bionicle_159 wrote on 2020-06-27, 01:41:

I was trying to add another drive for IDE storage to my 98SE rig, it kept taking the d: drive letter from my DVD burner. After a lot of troubleshooting, reading forums posts, repartitioning under fdisk and enabling and disabling options - I’ve gotten to where I can’t see my DVD drive under Windows.

I’ve tried restoring old registries and looking at safe mode settings, no dice. I didn’t change anything drastic to get to this point, just enabling DMA on my drive (something Windows said it would disable if it wasn’t supported, not hide the drive from me!)

Any ideas appreciated, this ordeal will definitely teach me to make drive images sooner.

Does it still work under DOS ? It may just have decided to die altogether . Enabling DMA should not have killed it . If it did die, it would be an unlucky coincidence.

deleting the busmaster IDE drivers from device manager and letting them reinstall is what i would try here. ATAPI drives disappearing in win9x after swapping things around seems to be quite commonplace.

auron wrote on 2020-06-27, 02:15:

deleting the busmaster IDE drivers from device manager and letting them reinstall is what i would try here. ATAPI drives disappearing in win9x after swapping things around seems to be quite commonplace.

Definitely worth a shot.

If that does not fix it, I would still test under DOS to make sure the drive still works before pursuing other tests under Windows .

darry wrote on 2020-06-27, 02:18:

auron wrote on 2020-06-27, 02:15:

deleting the busmaster IDE drivers from device manager and letting them reinstall is what i would try here. ATAPI drives disappearing in win9x after swapping things around seems to be quite commonplace.

Definitely worth a shot.

If that does not fix it, I would still test under DOS to make sure the drive still works before pursuing other tests under Windows .

Agree ! Another thing: Assuming standard dual IDE controller, how did you add the extra HD AND How was the one HD and DVD originally hooked up ? I would keep the first HD as master/single on first IDE channel and put second HD on second IDE channel as Master with the DVD as slave. Of course you could set it up different but always found it best if the boot HD never be master to a CDR or DVDR.

It still shows up under safe mode so I assume it's not dead, it still ejects when powered outside of windows and I used a disc on it 3 days ago. It came out of a 2006 Dell, so it's age shouldn't be a problem. I tried removing all IDE controllers from the device manager but made no progress after it set them back up again after a reboot.

I had the boot and optical drives separate to each other until I tried adding more storage to the machine. An SD card adapter is the boot device, it doesn't have a back panel mount, so I thought adding a CF to IDE adapter I had would help me get around having to open the case up each time I wanted to transfer a new game to the PC.

I didn't have any extension cables, so I made the boot and optical drives share the primary channel and used the secondary just for the CF card adapter, I had already set the D: drive to be reserved to the DVD burner so I assume it's a kernel problem that requires hard drives to be higher letters, just like how floppy drives are always higher in PCs.

in this case, shouldn't pulling out the IDE drive (CF card i suppose) you added last restore things to the previous state?

auron wrote on 2020-06-27, 22:32:

in this case, shouldn't pulling out the IDE drive (CF card i suppose) you added last restore things to the previous state?

You’d think that, but nope. I’m pretty sure Windows has hidden the device, I’d know what to do if this was NT but 9x is uncharted territory for me with these issues.

i guess you already tried deleting the NoIDE=1 entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\IOS, assuming it's there? this seems to be mentioned a lot for win9x CD drive issues. also deleting any BAD_IDE entries in registry.

Seeing the drive in device manager in safe mode is no guarantee the drive is actually detected . "Phantom" devices (that are no longer present or connected) in Windows 9x safe mode are common . Additionally, in Windows 9x safe mode, even a normally working optical drive will not be accessible as its drivers are not loaded (the possible exception to this is if real-mode DOS CD-ROM drivers are loaded in config.sys and autoexec.bat ) .

Which brings us back to question : does it work in DOS ?

If it does work, I suggest using the scanreg.exe tool (included with Windows 98 SE) from real-mode DOS to restore a previous copy of the registry . Of course, you are free to try it before testing the drive in DOS first .

Wanted to do a sanity check by using a different SD card with Win2k, games read off the disk fine so it was definitely a driver issue.
Separated the hard drive and optical drive, having them on their own cable, caused 98 to show a generic cd rom show up in device manager (I’d tried before in safe mode to use a different driver). It read but obviously I wanted the drive to be fully working, so I removed it and rebooted. The drive came back up as it should as a TSSTcorp DVD drive.

Obviously I did some more troubleshooting to see what I could do to try and get the compact flash card to play nice with the other IDE drives, and also change it’s drive letter from D:

It turns out that the CF card is very picky and will only work with 9x if it’s on its own IDE cable. Even after ticking the ‘removable’ box in device manager, it still wouldn’t let me change the letter. I don’t have this issue with USB devices or optical drives, so I’m thinking the CF card needs it’s own driver to make Windows know it’s not an internal drive. Win2k and XP would see the CF card properly as a removable drive and let me change the drive letter.

Most things online point to just using the default hdd driver, but obviously that’s not going to work as this is the reason I can’t change the letter.

I’m using a ‘dumb’ CF to IDE adapter from eBay, this doesn’t have any logic between the CF card and the IDE channel, it reads the card directly.
As always, if anyone has any ideas or links to drivers that can help me change the drive letter it is really appreciated.

darry wrote on 2020-06-28, 03:22:

Which brings us back to question : does it work in DOS ?

Now it does 😄

Does no one know how to change the drive letters for IDE hard drives? Working with USB speeds is dreadful.