Hi PCBUILDers, and please excuse my long posting.

My story:

Once upon a time, there was a nice computer which
worked flawlessly since the day of its birth, more than
a year ago.  It's an AcerOpen AX6LC MoBo, PII/333 MHz,
64 MBytes DRAMM, 6.4 GByte Maxtor HDD (Primary Master),
an old but very reliable Creative 6X CD-ROM Drive as
Primary Slave, Sound Blaster 32 sound card, ATIExpert
AGP 8MB Video card and Win95 (OSR2) as the OS.

Two weeks ago, one Monday morning during boot up, an awful
blue screen came up with a message reading more or less:
"Windows has detected a child device not supported in this
configuration..." and some other details I must confess not
to remember.  Windows then entered in Safe Mode and after
re-configuring the video settings everything appeared to be
running fine... at that time.

Some days after I tried to run a CD-ROM in my drive and found
that it was no longer recognized.  I then found that exploring
"My Computer" showed no trace of the once existing drive, so I
went to the Device Manager and found three brand new yellow
"!" under Hard Disk Controllers:

! Creative Labs IDE Controller
! Primary IDE Controller (Single FIFO).......Using IRQ 14)
! Secondary IDE Controller (Single FIFO).....(Using IRQ 15)
and a Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller with no "!" on it...(Using IRQ 14
and 15 )

None of the above devices shows any conflict listed in the
"Resource" Tab, but Performance reports that "Drive C is running
in MS-DOS compatibility mode file system"

I've tried deleting every conflicting device, but Windows brings
them up again during boot up, I tested the CD-ROM drive in another
computer and it works fine, I even reinstalled Windows ending
exactly in the same situation.

Double clicking the Creative IDE Controller\General shows a message
saying that the "Device is causing a resource conflict," but I can't
find the cause of such a sudden conflict and this thing is driving
me crazy.  I'm trying not to reach the "dramatic" decision of
reformating the HDD to start from the very beginning because
my computer has never "seen" its CD drive again.

Could someone PLEASE give me a clue of what else can I do?
I would deeply appreciate any advice.

TIA

Frank.
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NO HARDWARE changes has been made since it was built up, nor
any SOFTWARE or Software drivers were changed in the past few
month.

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>