[Kegs]

Hi folks.

After getting a black screen and nothing else after the xp splash screen on start up I performed a repair installation of xp. The installation stalled at 34%, which after a bit of searching I discovered was a common problem. I did as advised and disabled unnecessary drives and the USB ports and the installation completed.

The problem is that now my second hard drive and my DVD RW aren't being detected. The drives aren't appearing in device manager either. Also If I insert a memory pen or whatever into a USB port, I get the musical tones and the "found new hardware" bubble but after it says it is ready to use, nothing shows up in my computer.

The second hard drive and the USB ports had been disabled during the repair installation, but the DVD drive hadn't.

Everything is detected and shows up fine in the BIOS.

Normally I would just back up and re-install windows, but without the second hard drive, the DVD writer or even a memory pen I can't back anything up and there are files I can't afford to lose!

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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not sure which to tackle first here....

Which controllers are the non-working devices attached to? Which controller is the working harddrive attached to?

[gerryf]

not sure which to tackle first here....

Which controllers are the non-working devices attached to? Which controller is the working harddrive attached to?

[Kegs]

The working hard drive is a maxtor SATA drive attached to the RAID controller, The second drive is the secondary IDE slave, and the DVD is the primary IDE master.

[gerryf]

interesting....

so, it seems as if the ide driver is not installed?...well, that is strange....

What do you see under ide/ata-atapi controllers in device manager?

[Kegs]

Primary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE channel
VIA bus Master IDE controller

In the primary and secondary properties it says no drivers are installed for this device. The VIA bus says it is working properly.

[Kegs]

Aha! I clicked update driver in the primary IDE chanell and it installed and the DVD came back!

I tried the same for the secondary though and it said "error during installation - driver is not intended for this platform" ?!? now it has the yellow exclamation mark on it.

I just installed them through the windows online option.

That's one down anyway, Thanks!

Edited by Kegs, 20 April 2006 - 08:54 AM.

[gerryf]

now, where the yellow ! is, delete it and reboot
windows should rediscover the hardware

[Kegs]

Didn't see your last post before I tried this, but I searched around and found a solution to rename C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\atapi.sys to atapi.old

I did this and tried installing the driver again and this time it worked and the hard drive came back!


Thank you very, very much for your help!

[Kegs]

hmm, slight problem. I rebooted, but the memory pens still won't show up in my computer, although they show up in device manager.

Any ideas?

[gerryf]

Didn't see your last post before I tried this, but I searched around and found a solution to rename C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\atapi.sys to atapi.old

I did this and tried installing the driver again and this time it worked and the hard drive came back!
Thank you very, very much for your help!

that was as good a solution--

OK, in device manager, I want you to right click everything under Universal Serial BUs Controllers and choose uninstall


then reboot

Windows will reload system drivers on reboot