Via 4 in 1 drivers in Win2K making my drives SCSI? Odd...

[J3anyus]

Problem solved

So, I finally got my new rig up and running the way I want it to (if you're interested, look in my sig), but the DVD drive and burner were being a little touchy. I have two 60GB hard drives running RAID 0, and then a burner running Primary Master and a DVD drive running Secondary Master (no slaves on either IDE channel). So, both the DVD drive and the burner were acting odd, and that's when I realized I hadn't installed the VIA Bus Mastering drivers yet. So, I went and downloaded the latest version, and installed it. Now they work much better, but there's a new problem. When I go into the device manager, both my DVD drive and burner show up as SCSI devices. When I remove the Bus Mastering driver, they become IDE again. Re-install the driver, and they're SCSI. This isn't causing many problems, but it is causing one big one...I can't burn CDs. When I go to burn a CD in CloneCD or Nero, it fills up the buffers, and then stops and gives me an error that it can't write to the disc or something like that. If I uninstall the drivers, everything works fine again, except the performance of my drives gets really crappy. Sooooooo....any ideas?

Picture of my Device Manager

Notes:
Running VIA Bus Mastering Driver version 3.1.1.0
Also tried an older version (can't remember number), same thing happened

Really an odd problem...any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
J3

 

[rectifire]

Have you installed the lastest VIA 4 in1 drivers yet? (I think the lastest version is 4.35 available from viaarena)

VIA 4 in 1 drivers contain an IDE filter driver for Windows 2000 which "enables the performance enhancing bus mastering functions on ATA-capable Hard Disk Drives and ensures IDE device compatibility" as quoted from the VIA driver installation instructions. I believe this 4 in 1 driver is the one you are looking for.

I am unclear as to whether you installed the standalone Busmaster drivers available on the viaarena website, as that sounds like what you did. Those aren't supposed to be used with Windows 2000 (according to the installation instructions on the website, they are intended for Windows NT), which is why you are probably having problems.

As so, my advice would be to uninstall the standalone busmaster drivers, reboot, and then install the IDE drivers included with the 4 in 1.


My apologies in advance if you already know this, but checking the simple things never hurts.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

 

[J3anyus]

I haven't tried that, may work. I'm using an EPoX 8K7A+, which has an AMD north bridge and a VIA south bridge, so the IDE busmaster driver is the only one I need to install. I'll try downloading those and seeing if I can install ONLY the IDE driver. Thanks for the advice.

 

[rectifire]

The only thing you won't need to install from the 4 in 1's is the AGP drivers, since those drivers come from AMD for the 761 north bridge. Just unselect the AGP driver option when you install the 4 in 1 drivers. Leave the other two options checked (the ones for the VIA inf file and the VIA IDE driver)

The AMD 761 AGP drivers for windows 2000 are of course available from AMD HERE

Good luck!

 

[J3anyus]

You sir, are god

Thanks a ton, you just worked out the last kink I had in my rig. Everything is working perfectly now.

J3

 

[rectifire]

Most excellent, glad to hear it, and glad to help out. Most likely your IDE devices will report as IDE (not SCSI), and your devices will work properly.

Your device manager should say that your VIA busmaster drivers are dated 3/26/2001 and version 5.0.2195.5110