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IDE CONTROLLERS

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After five hours on this computer I am still getting nowhere. I put a new Seagate 40gig hard drive in it approx 2 months ago, it was returned to me yesterday due to explorer.exe error messages. I tried re-installing windows 98 but after installation same message. Formatted and resinstalled windows okay, but then noticed I had no cd rom drive or burner drive. The system is a Jetway board around 3years old with an 850 Cel cpu, the hard drive is partitioned into two halves. I have tried many things in the last five hours, all drives are recognised in the Bios, and in the Post boot up screen. Boot up floppy recognises cdrom and gives it a drive letter for reinstalling. Win98 installs okay (on board Lan) asks you for network identification details and finishes install, but then there is no cd rom drives. I have tried a new cd rom drive and same thing. Tried changing cd rom drive to slave from hard drive, tried changing jumpers on hard drive from Chs to Master. Trouble is in Device Manager there are yellow question marks against all ide controllers for master and slave drives. Tried redoing Fdisk, re partitioning, Tried Sys C. Same thing. I then tried a little 3 gig hard drive, installed win98 did not ask for network identification and all drives were recognised, all ide controllers were recognised in Device Manager. I am now trying it as an unpartitioned drive with the total 40gig, why is it taking the drive as a network drive?? when it does not with the 3gig. The next step will be to put the 40gig on a different computer and see what happens. Going of my brain here please help, thank you

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This is definitely odd behavior that the HD would be read as a network drive and that your cdrom doesn’t show; what’s more strange is that everything appears fine when you use the 3 gig drive.

I’d suggest these steps:

1) First before you drive yourself further up a wall — try the 40 gig with a totally different computer as you suggested you were thinking of doing. If it acts in a similar fashion then you know its the drive and not anything else. In this case your solution is easy return the drive, get a new one.

2) If the same problems happen on the different computer, I’d check out the bios on the motherboard of the original computer (the one with the Jetway board — btw I never heard of them..lol). I’m thinking its possible you could just have a way outdated bios that has an issue dealing with the particular model/make of drive you have. While I never had this experience with a HDD there were times a video card I had didn’t work until I updated the motherboard bios.

3) Are you sure yourself or someone else didn’t change the bios settings from the original factory set default settings? It depends how robust your bios options are but in most (if not all) modern bios menus these days you have the ability to select the block addressing scheme and even the PIO level sometimes. But using factory settings you ensure the most generic settings are being used (the most generic settings support the widest array of commonly used hardware).

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Time to close this question I think, most of the things you mentioned I had already thought of or done such as try hard drive on another computer and Bios was okay with the hard drive when first installed, and I had made sure that bios was on default settings, but thanks for the comments.

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All you need to do is install the drivers for the motherboard in my opinion, hence the yellow dots. This might be easier said than done if they are on a cd and you cant see the cd in windows though! Either boot from floppy and copy em onto the hdd from the comand prompt. Or download em of course.

I dont know if this has the right ones for you board as you dont mention the model….. http://www.j-mark.com/dl/dl.html

Look under motherboard driver in the ide column and chipset driver ide – both are down towards the end.

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Sorry but I did not need to install the drivers the first time around, so did not solve the problem but thanks for the comments.

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Thanks for the fast comments. I did not mention that this is the second hard drive in this computer that this has happened to, the last one I put in was a 20gig, returned with same explorer.exe error messages, this was a used HD, so replaced with the 40gig new one. Why the same message and why did it work okay for the last 2 months??? Yes I wondered what could the user be doing to cause this, I always put a Bios password on systems, and users are not that good with computers that they could get passed the password. They download a lot of music, can a virus mess up your Bios?? I am sure it has something to do with the Bios and size of drive but it is recognised in there, I am going to try it on another computer now. Thank you

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I have had this happen before in a compaq computer. What I endded up finding was that the person tried to reload windows themselves and corrupted the OS. The hard drive also had a virus in the boot sector of the drive that Norton couldn’t find.

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I do not think they tried to reload windows + remember I repartioned and formatted plus Fdisked MBR but thanks for the comments

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While you’ve got HDD hooked up to another PC, scan it for virii.

May want to investigate BIOS updates for mobo and see what problems they fix. Wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and flash BIOS anyway.

Mobo is definitely new enough that it should easily recognize and handle a 40GB HDD.

Are you installing Win 98SE? 98SE is much preferable to 98. But either one is subject to file corruption. What apps is user running? Music downloads or porno site access?

Any way to install 2000 pro? Much more stable OS and will run well on 850 Cellie with 128MB RAM.

I’m just thinking as I go here. You really have a strange one. Real head scratcher is why 3GB drive works OK and 40GB doesn’t.

Dalton

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Starting to see more Jetway boards from on-line vendors and mid-tier distributors. Have worked with a couple and they seem to be of decent quality, somewhere between PC Chips and Asus.

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Note that Win XP has a 32GB limit on FAT32 partitions.

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Scratch last comment. Know from experience that XP will handle another FAT32 drive of >32GB.

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Again bios worked okay with this hard drive when first installed + I re partioned and formatted the hard drive + fdisked MBR so did not solve problem re no IDE controllers installed this time, but thanks for the comments.

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I am thinking it could be mother board driver problem but although i am not familiar with this brand of MB i would not be surprised if originally the system had a hidden partition on it and this is where the drivers are ( just like Compaq) if this is the case it is not as simple as just installing them , in fact you would need to flash the bios with the manufacturers software.

Like I said it is just a thought.
If you post back with more specific MB specs, ( model, version etc.) If you go to the folowing url and enter the details you may come up with a model number, keep in mind it is only successful if your board is listed in thier database, but it is worth a try.
http://www.motherboards.org/tools/moboidtools.html

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After looking at your last comment I would say go to the website for your HDD manufacturer and download the diagnostic utility , it may or may not reveal where the problem lies , it could be a dodgy HDD, else low level format the drive an start again , I have revived 2 drives this way i the past 2 weeks.
Hpe this helps.

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The first part of your comment did not solve problem but the added comment about the diagnostic utility seems to have worked. I downloaded the Seagate Diagnostic utility and Disc Wizard, one of them done the trick I have now re-installed windows and “Wa La” I have ide controllers. But I have still given the lady a new hard drive and asked her to keep a log book, especially on internet (I hope) Just to find out what has caused this on both hard drives, Thanks for the Help

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Since the Motherboard was made after windows 98 came out, sounds like you do need to install the chipset drivers as was mentioned.

Before you attempt booting back to the desktop try the old school way to make Windows recognize that there’s a CDROM in the system.

You can use CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT to load IDE-CD.SYS & MSCDEX.EXE commands for the CDROM. Once you do this and start Windows it will be running in Protected Mode. After rebooting the drivers won’t need to loaded from DOS and will be changed to remarks.

REM By Windows Setup A:\MSCDEX /D:NCI000 /V

To use the DOS driver again just delete the words in front of the actual command.

To disable the DOS driver from CONFIG.SYS put the character ; in front of the line for the CDROM to make it a remark.

You can use the IDE-CD.SYS file and duplicate command lines from the boot floppy. To get the command lines needed just look in CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT on your boot floppy by editing them in DOS. Type the same command lines into the C: drive’s CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT, then change the path to match the hard drive instead of the floppy disk.

For CONFIG.SYS-
DEVICE=C:\IDE-CD.SYS /D:NCI000

AUTOEXEC.BAT-
C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:NCI000 /V

Then copy the IDE-CD.SYS file from A: drive to the root of the C:

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Did not need to do this the first time around when Win98se installed with no problems so something happened to the hard drive after it left here, therefore your comment did not help with why no Ide controllers this time only but thanks for the comments.

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I know alot has been said here but there is one thing to keep in mind..

When you see a yellow exclamation point on a device it mean there is conflicting device attempting to use the same interrupt, memory address etc..

Are you settings in the bios set correctly, typically auto is good, some older bios force you to choose the hard drive type.. lba, auto, chs etc..

It sounds to me like your motherboard firmware does not work with your drive firmware.. Hence the error..

Were you always using the full partition for the 98 load this time and the time it worked fine? Also were you using the same install cd for both installation attempts? Bad cd maybe, hey it happens.

Anyway I wish you luck and will monitor any follow ups..

Good luck

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Sorry but does not relate to the fact that Win98se installed with no problems the first time, so something has happened to the hard drive since it left here, also the fact that after a couple of months with each hard drive they were returned with same error messages

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Thanks for all the comments. In device manager says no conflicts, and also remember that this 40gig was installed onto this computer 2 months ago with no problems??? I have’nt had a chance to do much more as have others to work on but a couple of other weird things have happened with this hard drive. You are probably going to think I am crazy but realy happening. I attach hard drive to my computer as a mass storage USB drive. and my WinXP (fat32) reads the partitions all different. It is as if there are hidden partitions, it is a 40gig and okay you do loose part of that but two partitions only come up with 18.6 approx on each partition. That leaves about 3 1/2 ?? When attached to my computer I copied the whole drivers disc onto it. But the win98 folders could not be seen, put it back on the original computer and win98 comes up but the drivers folders I copied could not be found. Definately there before I removed the drive. If I make it one partition my computer sees TWO 18.6 partitions. If I make two partitons, then on my computer it only sees one 18.6 partition??? My computer is reading different partitions to the original computer. Now to this Explorer Exe. errors this can be a virus I have been told but is it strong enough to destroy partitions or to make hidden ones????
Sorry but I am not crazy but it is making me that way. Thanks again

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I think that diskaus has the right idea. If you are seeing different things on 2 different computers, I think that you have to determine if the hard drive has a problem (physical or file sytem). Seagate does have an excellent diagnostic disk that you can download for free. If it tells you that the hard drive is good, do the low level format (Seagate may call it “writing all zeros”).

There still remains the fact that the computer did the same with the 20 HD earlier. ??

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Yes this seems to have solved the problem, downloaded both diagnostic and disc wizard both recognised the hard drive and said okay, disc wizard formatted it and I have now reinstalled windows with no problems, I have yet to discover how this has happened to both hard drives and both same error messages. I have asked the lady to keep a log book of anything, installed/uninstalled and any downloads. Hope she does this. I did not give her back this hard drive but replaced with a new one so that we are starting from new again and see what happens. Thanks for the answer

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