(no subject)
Another geek post, but on all the forums and everywhere "google" I really never found help for this one! I did, however solve it, and have been advised to post the results! Have you ever had the problem where windows has decided suddenly that your ide drives are scsi? your perfectly ordinary DVD burner is now a scsi device for no obvious reason. Well it happened to me, and it was a problem because the eject would regularly lock up, and the only clean way to get a disc out was to shutdown the whole system or delete and then re discover the drive in device manager. Well, I finally found out what it is that causes this. It's when you load some of the drivers that actually come with the motherboard. So, if you leave your generic IDE controller alone, it's all fine, but if you load it's proper drivers, everything go's to sh*t!
What to do.
Find the name of the controller device, might be something like
Marvell 91xx Config SCSI Processor Device
or
Intel(R) ICH10 Family 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller
Now, I should say, this might all change if you have bios set to IDE compatible mode which is often the default, and of course XP won't naturally install if you don't. Sadly, AHCI is what you should be using, but you have to do some pretty heavy duty messing around with a windows CD or some floppy discs, (Remember those?) if you want to use that. It's too much messing around for most but the experts! Fortunately, much of the problem has gone away under w7, but then you have to put up with it's hideous interface which isn't cool! Anyway, getting back to XP and device manager, the trick is to go into IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and work out which controller you are dealing with. Then you need to go into \windows\inf and search for all .inf files that contain the brand name of that device. There will be many that are for other kinds of devices, but that's not a problem.
Now, make a backup directory somewhere out of the way, and move all these .inf files into it. Now, delete the controllers in device manager, then right click and scan for new devices. With luck it will fail to find drivers for it and windows will put it back as something like:
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
If you have achieved this, you can delete the drives that are marked as SCSI and do a reboot. Fingers crossed, it should now all come up as it used to! All those weired eject problems, and your system drive turning up in "safely remove devices" will be a thing of the past!
What to do.
Find the name of the controller device, might be something like
Marvell 91xx Config SCSI Processor Device
or
Intel(R) ICH10 Family 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller
Now, I should say, this might all change if you have bios set to IDE compatible mode which is often the default, and of course XP won't naturally install if you don't. Sadly, AHCI is what you should be using, but you have to do some pretty heavy duty messing around with a windows CD or some floppy discs, (Remember those?) if you want to use that. It's too much messing around for most but the experts! Fortunately, much of the problem has gone away under w7, but then you have to put up with it's hideous interface which isn't cool! Anyway, getting back to XP and device manager, the trick is to go into IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and work out which controller you are dealing with. Then you need to go into \windows\inf and search for all .inf files that contain the brand name of that device. There will be many that are for other kinds of devices, but that's not a problem.
Now, make a backup directory somewhere out of the way, and move all these .inf files into it. Now, delete the controllers in device manager, then right click and scan for new devices. With luck it will fail to find drivers for it and windows will put it back as something like:
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
If you have achieved this, you can delete the drives that are marked as SCSI and do a reboot. Fingers crossed, it should now all come up as it used to! All those weired eject problems, and your system drive turning up in "safely remove devices" will be a thing of the past!