Help Me!

[palemistress]

So guess what? Instead of a real update, I'm going to ask you all for help. Here's the deal... I have a fairly old system. I haven't updated the BIOS or drivers in ages and ages. Now I have installed a DVD-RW, and Windows XP does not recognize it. After doing as much probing as I could think of to do, I think it's because I don't have any IDE

Comments

[minwee]

Unless your system comes from the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the IDE controller (also called ATA or ATAPI for reasons that aren't really important) is on the motherboard. Windows XP comes with a generic "IDE Controller" device driver which will work with just about anything, although it may not give the best performance.

If you look at the Device Manager page (right click on "My Computer", select "Properties" and then "Hardware" to find it) then you should see an entry for "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" which will list whichever driver your system is using. If you don't have that then you may find it stuffed under "Other Devices" as a non-functioning device.

If you want the "proper" drivers for everything then just find the exact make and model of your motherboard and look on the manufacturer's site for the drivers. Your best bet to find that information is to boot it up and watch the self-test messages carefully. Make sure you get the exact model, as boards with similar sounding names like the ASUS A7N8X, A7V8X and A7V8X-X can be built around very different chipsets.

When you are doing that you should also check to see that your new DVD drive is being detected at all by the BIOS. If it is but Windows can't see it then it may be a driver thing, but if it doesn't show up at all then your problem could just be with hardware. Make sure the cables are all good, that you don't have any weird 'Cable Select' issues (these are common with Dell PCs) and that all the master/slave jumpers are where they ought to be, and ensure that the IDE controllers are enabled and able to auto-detect everything connected to them. Even if your BIOS is too old to know what a DVD-RW is it should tell you that it sees a CDROM device of some kind, as that's all that it really needs to know.

Updating BIOS can be a bit tricky and if anything goes wrong it could make a big mess of your motherboard, so try to avoid it unless you are experiencing a specific issue that the new BIOS version will correct. The manufacturer's site should have the most recent official BIOS available along with release notes explaining just what the changes are.

[palemistress]

Wow, thanks so much. I've since managed to get Windows to recognize the device, but it won't install it.

There are two pieces of uninstalled hardware (?) on my PC... COM3 and the DVD-RW. COM3 shows a code 19 error -- it doesn't have the appropriate drivers and the DVD-RW just shows up as not capable of being installed; code 28.

So now I'm looking for drivers for the COM3 port... I'm assuming it's a port...

[minwee]

Normally you will have two serial ports at COM1 and COM2. COM3 is probably a modem.