XP Home re-install cannot find serial ATA devices

Thanks Liz.... your efforts ARE appreciated....

I found an old post on something very similar. In this case however, the victim had implemented the RAID option which I never used on anything. What intrigues me is that he seemed to have solved the issue not by doing anything at all in XP, but my moving a drive on his MB, and then pretty much disabling all drives in the BIOS. Tell me if this makes sense to you.... (it's a short thread).

https://forums.geforce.com/default/...9-t-install-nforce4-430-motherboard-problems/

 

1. Moved the CD/DVD drive to the Secondary IDE channel Master.

2. Left the SATA disks on the SATA1 & SATA2 channels.

3. In the BIOS Main section, set the Primary IDE Master & Slave explicitly to None.

4. In the BIOS Advanced > Onboard Device Config. > IDE Function Setup, set OnChip IDE Channel 0 = Disabled and SATA Port 3, 4 = Disabled.

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well , what the op did for his issue cleared the issue, but I do not really understand what he did as I have not ever used a sata drive on my desktop, I still have and IDE drive.
So do what he did, or similar based on your setup and see what happens, because you can always put it back.

 

Tried.... my CMOS setup won't allow me to make such changes...... could only disable the IDE drives. When I tried to disable the SATA drives for some reason my changes were not saved or even updated on the screen.

At this point, I think I should just crack the case open, toss in a big bowl of spaghetti and reboot!!!

 

is cmos the same as bios??

did you receive a dialog box asking you to save changes?

what does it say under IDE section of your device manager

how are your drives listed in bios??

 

Bios = Basic Input Output System and is like the firmware that comes with a lot of devices including your MB. These basic hardware profiles are stored on a chip on the MB. Sometimes they are advertised as being ROM (read only memory), but since you can "flash" your BIOS to upgrade to a newer version, they are not truly ROM.

Cmos is actually an acronym for a chip type on which edits to your Bios are stored. When you hit Delete (or what ever) at the boot up flash screen you can enter the Cmos setup pages which allow you to define different drives, boot order, time/date, etc.... these changes are stored on the Cmos chip and will be used for each subsequent boot as long as the chip still has power from the Cmos battery. If your battery loses power then you'll see changes at boot because the system will revert back to only those instructions in the Bios chip.

In my Cmos;
Primary IDE Master = Seagate 40G ATA HD (my D: drive)
Secondary IDE Master = Teac CDRW (my F: drive)
Primary Sata0 = WD500G HD (my C: [WinXP install] drive)
Secondary Sata0 = WD500G HD (my E: drive)

Don't ask me why there are Primary and Secondary Sata channels like this.... the drives are plugged into Sata1 and Sata2 on the MB.

Device manager says I have 3 Primary IDE controllers, 3 Secondary IDE controllers, and one Duel IDE PCI controller under "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers"

There are two more IDE Controllers installed under "Scsi/Raid controllers". These two have "unknown" drivers installed. All the other drivers are Microsoft.... same exact version dated 2001.

So even though my install must have utilized the much newer Sata drivers, WinXP doesn't show them anywhere.

 

Just install/reinstall this drivers, please.

 

I just did that a few hours ago.... again.
The install was successful.... again.
Device manager shows no Sata devices..... again.
At re-start I get a bunch of "found new hardware" (but can't find it).... again.

 

Sorry, I knew the diff tween cmos and bios, just wasn't sure that you did, the drive functions/labels, etc should be held in the bios, the cmos may need to be reset, power off, pull cmos battery wait about five minutes, and replace battery, restart and check to see if the device listings have changed, worth a shot anyway,

 

Timing is everything? My Cmos battery happened to go belly up last week.... I just got around to replacing it 2 days ago. :b

 

I am at a loss, I will keep searching around to see if I can spot a solution,

 

I've been having good fun!!! Since M.S.I. didn't have anything new, I decided to check Nvidia.... the online utility scanned my system and spit out a driver package recommended just for me..... wooo hooo. I D/L'd the zip and checked it out... looked just like what I already had but about 2 years newer, so I installed the driver package and re-booted.

"File is missing or corrupt.... C:\windows\system32\config\SYSTEM"

Same error when I booted to "last good configuration".... and when I tried booting to "safe mode".... Decided now might be a good time to backup some of the more recent new data, so tried booting with my SourceForge boot repair USB stick.... "no such device... (a3gala54ll..... etc) entering grub_repair"

What good is a bootable USB device that needs something on the HD b4 it will boot???

So I booted with the XP install CD and got into Repair Console.... copied the 5 registry files from a previous "snapshot".... same error. Then tried an older snapshot, then from the Windows\Repair directory..... same error on boot every time. Tried "chkdsk /P" and /R..... tried "fixboot".... nada.

Took battery out of MB and let things (including myself) cool off for a long time..... put same battery back in and ended up booting to WinXPsp3 setup in progress....??? (I had no disks or anything in the other boot devices).

Also got a new bios error along the way.... "not enough space in runtime... Msbios not available" yippee.

Always booted to this XP setup program, so I went back to the Repair Console and copied registry files into Config directory one more time.... finally booted normal back to my previous install from 2 days b4. Even got my "found new hardware" (but can't find it) errors on startup back.

I don't think nVidia loves me any more!!!

 

sounds like you had a hell of a day

I am not sure how I can help you, unless you just block the notifications and then keep going with your system since you said it works fine except for that error.?

 

That sounds like a fair enough plan for now Liz..... much better than going through all that DOS prompt just to boot again! :b

 

I am happy to report the pop-up boxes are gone, and everything appears to be very normal.... and very fast!

Spent much time playing with DevCon.exe, a command line utility for dealing with device drivers. It taught me a lot, but I couldn't get the "update" or "install" commands to work. The syntax is quite cryptic and in some cases you even need to edit the INF file you want to use.

While trying to find help on this, I came across DPINST32.EXE (also available in the 64 flavor). This is a stand-alone driver package installer. I simply copied the file to where my updated drivers were stored (which I could never install b4), double clicked it, and in no time my drivers definitely changed! You can also use this utility from the command line with option switches.

At first it left behind a yellow ? device under SCSI and RAID, but since I don't have these things in use I just uninstalled it to get rid of that "found new hardware" box.

Device Manager now shows 2 Nvidia Serial ATA controllers under the ATA/ATAPI section, along with 1 Primary and 1 Secondary IDE Channel, and a single "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller". The SCSI/RAID parent is gone.

I don't have any speed test stuff, but from a cold machine I'm now seeing the Windows start page in less than 15 seconds..... add 10 to that if I just let Grub run it's course. That's perty fast for this old bucket!

Happy, happy...... Joy, joy

 

good work,