By all appearances (and listers please confirm) it sounds like your
motherboard may be getting a little senile.  You have all the indications of
an IDE controller failure.  It's possible (and hopefully true) that it could
be a bad cable or possibly even a voltage problem with the power supply.
The only way to really tell is to rebuild the system on a different
motherboard and see if the problem goes away.  Not a very happy prospect.

Kyle

From: "Francisco Novo" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2000 7:33 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] C drive switched to MS-DOS comp. mode !!!


> 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.
> [log in to unmask]

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