More unhelpful help
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Working in DOS
When you say that the drives do work when you are not in Windows I am guessing that you can use the drives when booting into DOS. If your drives actually work in DOS then you know you have good hardware and you have messed up a windows driver. When you say they don't work in Windows, do you mean you can see but not access them or that you cannot see them. If access is the problem, what is the actual message you get ? You could try going into Device Manager and removing your CD and DVD drives and controllers, if you can see them, and rebooting. If that doesn't work, try removing your IDE controller (Parent Device) and rebooting.
Your motherboard should have come with a driver disk containing updates for several of it's features, you may find an updated IDE device driver on that disk, you could try installing it. 4X AGP drivers can interfere with the IDE controller as well. Turning on the 4X feature can sometimes mess up your drive controller. If removing a driver doesn't repair a persistent problem you can look for the actual driver file that is installed and delete that file. This will force the PNP startup routines to request a new driver rather than allowing them to re-use existing ones. The Power On Self Test results are the first screens you see when you boot and report the state of the hardware diagnostic as it runs. If your drives are recognized there, they are testing OK. If you can use them in DOS, they are OK, you have messed up your windows and must unmess it.
Most of this stuff could screw things up really well but if you rolled your own it should be fun. If you are messing around with the IDE controller and Scandisk wants to fix an error during the process be sure to have floppy or two handy to make an undo disk, heheheh, very important. You could make your drive look like this.
Directory of C:COMMAND COM 93,890
DIR00001 <DIR>
DIR00002 <DIR>
DIR00003 <DIR> |
