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Second Hard Drive causing ms-dos compatibility mode

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squiggy

Programmer
Nov 1, 2001
30
US
I have two quantum 15 gig harddrives and when i plug the other hard drive in it uses ms-dos mode and it don't matter which ide channel i use,primary or secondary,I checked the ios.log and i get as the first line ESDI Head Mismatch,and it names the units that are going through real mode drivers,Then at the bottom it names two drivers:IO.sys and IFSHLP.sys.

Should i try to install these drivers again or look for another alternative,I personally think there is a problem with this hard drive.

Any suggestions??????????????

Squiggy
 
Please share with the other users how you fix it.
It may help someone else having the same problem.
Thanks
 
Well it's kinda risky,so i don't recommend it or endorse doing it,so if anybody screws up their system don't blame me.

But here's how i did it,it's actually pretty simple if you think about,as a matter of fact,i don't really know if it will work on other computers but here it goes:

First i opened up my device manager,found the Bus Master IDE Controller and removed it,your computer may freeze up and you may have to restart your computer with the reset button,and after it restarts it should reinstall all the drivers and the device,that's it!

Since doing this i have no problems and my system has been rock solid.

For some reason when i tried to reinstall drivers the normal way it would lock up and i had to restart,so i couldn't install them that way and i didn't feel like doing a fresh install of my OS,but if anyone has a better way i would like to hear it also.

Sorry about not posting my results but i just wanted to make sure it wasn't a temporary fix and the problem would return.
 
I had the same problem a few months back and had to follow the same procedure. I think it has something to do with the OS not properly assigning the right IDE drivers. If you look on the Performance tab, you'll see the ms-dos compatibilty mode flag. Also under device manager, one of the IDE controllers will usually have a yellow exclamation point next to them. Originally when you installed Windows, you only had one device on your primary IDE controller. Now that you have 2, the driver needs to be reconfigured or reinstalled.

At least that's my guess!! s-)
 
Iguess that could be the reason,but just like the cat,The Problem is back and it's very ticked off now i'm lucky if the c:\ drive works half the time,I guess i'll have to do a reinstall with two drives in my computer and see if that works,another thing i noticed is that both of my hard drives have two pins missing on the ide connector instead of the customary one,i wonder if that has anything to do with it?it looks like there was a pin there at one time but has broken off and both are in the same location in the connector,I think i'll give up on this gateway computer and build me a good system!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
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