Primary and secondary IDE controllers not working

Just updated memory on an older Compaq desktop, pentium 11, Windows 98. Computer automatically recognized the new memory but after this rebooting my two CD drives (CD/DVD and a CD writer) are not recognized.

Looking at the system device manager, it shows Yellow spots against the floppy drive controller and both the primary and secondary IDE controllers.

Went into configuration and on boot up the DOS screen does recognise the hard drive and both CD drives.

The floppy drive (A) is shown and does work. There is power to both CD drives and everything else appears to work.

I've looked through some of the postings here but have not found exactly this problem. One of the postings suggested deleting the non working device managers and re-booting. The primary and secondary are listed under a master device manager (Intel IDE....) which is shown as working and when I tried to delete the primary or secondary a note came up that you have to delete the master.....wasn't sure if I wanted to do this.

I did delete the floppy drive controler and on reboot it reinstalled the driver, but stil showed the yellow spot.

Somewhere I did also see a posting about tweaking the registry, but haven't found ths again.

I suppose it could be the mother board - could one add a separate IDE controller card, but not sure how to disable the mother board based controller.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Rob

 

Hi Rob
Let's see if we can solve this systematically. Remove the new Ram and see if you get the same results.

 

If you're left with the same results..... go into your device manager, and remove anything with a yellow splat, and reboot.

You might want to go to Compaq and see if you've got some drivers you need.

Do you have a motherboard cd?

*edit*
What Compaq model are you running?

 

I did try putting back the original RAM and also several combinations of, but no change.

It's a Compaq Presario 5140, originally with 98 MB RAM but able to upgrade and I put in less than the max (From Crucial and I checked for correct compatibility, etc.)

My concern removing the devices was that to remove the primary and secondary IDE controllers, it seems I have to remove the parent device which is shown to be working - Intel PCI Bus Master IDE Controller. Does removing this remove the hard drive controller? Presumably all the devices should be recognized on reboot and be re-installed.

The Floppy disc controller is also shown not to be working, although the flopy is shown in explorer and after removing and rebooting, it is still shown as not working - However, the floppy drive does work and I can see and copy info to and from a floppy.

Not sure what a motherboard CD is. I have the original Compaq re-install CD, but I have upgraded so much stuff on this computer over time, including the hard drive, that I am not sure whether this would be any good. I really would not want to revert to the original layout.

Rob

 

I still say to try to remove the devices under your device manager, and have it redetect on boot up.

Let us know how you make out.

 

I think Daizy is on the right track, BUT . . .

I would do this from safemode, and remove any other "ghost" devices also.

 

Absolutely Profgab101
Thanks....nice catch.

 

First of all thanks for the input and taking the time to help me.

I am not sure that I understand. Safe mode is a start-up method that only loads certain drivers, allowing you to try and solve conflict problems. Surely the Primary and Secondary IDE drivers, as devices, load before safe mode takes effect.

What are "ghost devices "?

I will have a go tomorrow (monday eveing) to delete all the drivers and see what happens on boot.

Rob

 

Hi robfrais- I found this in a newsletter that I received some months ago, I think from bootdisk.com. It addresses almost the same problem that you are experiencing. Here it is:

Micron PC P III 800 MHZ Windows 98 se System was working fine and now upon bootup there is no DVD or CDR-W listed on my computer. Bios shows both devices. Going into device manager I see 2 exclamation points on the Primary Ultra ATA controller and the Secondary Ultra ATA controller.
*** Ahhh, an oldie but goodie. 98% of the time its due to either windows putting a noide key in your registry or more rarely, a boot sector virus. So you have to search for the key in the registry by Hitting Start | Run | regedit | OK | Edit | Find | noide | Find Next, and delete any noide keys found in the right panel. Oddly enough, noide keys which prevent CDrom drive access can be put in the registry due to failed software installs from a bad CD disk or a dirty drive which cant read a disk. Since your CDrom drive is treated "like" a hard drive by Windows I suppose this is a way for Windows to "protect" itself by disabling the "bad" drive so you can still use your PC. If no [noide] keys were found then download F-Prot, a free dos based scanner.
Hope this helps you out. It seems worth a try. Clydeo22

 

Anohter thing to check (what I would have cehcekd first off, simply because it's so easy) is the BIOS settings. Make sure taht your CD drives are set to AUTO (possibly autodetect, but you get the idea), and make sure that the floppy drive is enabled, but the floppy drive seek option is disabled. I have seen the seek option cause simialr problems in the past

 

Ghost Devices

These are devices which are listed in the registry, but are not currently physically installed in your system.

Example: If you hook up different monitors that have unique hardware ID's in W98, windows will keep those in the registry. If you look under [+] Monitors in the Device Manager in NORMAL mode only the current one will show. But if you view [+] Monitors in the Device Manager in SAFE mode these prior monitors are shown.

Common Hardware that leaves Ghosts:

• CD / CDRW / DVD drives
• Display adaptors
• Keyboards
• Mice
• Modems
• Monitors
• Sound cards
• USB devices (Some)

Why is this an issue, it is one of the most common causes of windows lockups, windows is probing (polling) hardware and sometimes waits until it gets an answer.

If you have Upgraded your Video Card, Sound card, HID's or added a replacement Burner, there is a chance you may have ghosts... ( of the hardware you removed )

W2k & Xp offers an option to "Show Hidden Devices" but to see these in any of the W9x (includes ME) you have to check from safe mode.

(BTW - HID = Human Interface Devices, like mouse, Keyboards etc.)

 

Great suggestions everyone.

I did try removing all the devices, but they came right back after re-boot. Interestingly though on re-boot it didn't have a "normal" windows message such as new devices found - installing, just rebooted back up.

Also tried searching for noide, but there were none in the registry.

Did a reboot with bootlog.txt and then searched for failures. There were several, such as serenum.vxd, lptenum.vxd and ndis2sup.vxd, in system, plus hsflop.pdr and esdi_506.pdr in iosubsys. Copied each of these files from another computer, they were all the same size, but there were some different dates and re-booted. The two devices re-appeared!

Still failed to load ndis2sup.vxd and now had serial.vxd fail, sdvxd not loaded and an Adaptec driver cdrmmc.vxd fail.

Have not tried to write a CD yet, but both drives are there and can be read.

Still not sure what happened - will report back if I get any other fails. Now using Norton Speed disk/doctor to do a thorough check of the drive ( I had defragmented only a week ago)

Rob

 

Glad to hear it's working. Apparently you are not alone in having this problem. I found this on a different board. If anyone is interested go here:http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/6602.html

 

Well I thought it was all working. The drives are there and the regular CD drive appears to work. However the system crashes whenever I try to access the Plextor CD writer.

The Plextor uses the regular Windows drivers so after messing around some more and after my daughter complained of the system crashing while she is doing homework using MS Word, I thought I might re-install Windows 98. Even worse, all sorts of failures, luckily I did allow Windows to save the previous installation and was pretty impressed when everything restored to its former glory again.

So now not sure what to do. Think I'll probably disconnect the Plextor, uninstall all the related software (Adaptec, etc.) and then reconnect it to see what happens. I did find a firmware update for the Plextor, but this has had no effect.

Is there any way to just reinstall all the drivers that come with Windows 98, in case something is corrupted?

Last resort would be to reformat the hard drive and start completely fresh - just don't relish reloading all those programs to then find it's a hardware problem after all.

That's it for now,

Rob

 

Looking better

This is an update for those of you that have been kind enough to follow my journey and provide great suggestions.

Using the information shown in the bootlog.txt, I finally reinstalled the Adaptec direct CD software which appears to have fixed the CD writer problem. It was a stray dll that was wasn't loading.

I then re-ran speeddisk and noticed that there were very few programs!. Started to try varoius standard programs and found that MS office had basically disappeared. Yried re-installing, but the reinstall failed, then tried to remove and had problems here as well. Kept coming up with ODBC errors. Seems there was a different ODCB dll file. Looked at another system and copied the file ODBCint.dll from another computer. After this was able to delete and reinstall MS Office. Still came up with some stray errors on re-install, but nothing serious and seems to work now.

Appears to have been a hard drive meltdown, but no errors detected on the hard drive.

With fingers crossed, most things now seem to work!

Rob

 

I think its time for SFC!

Run the system file checker, it can't hurt.