I have seen this apparent cd-rom related hardware problem caused by a virus
on more than one occasion....sounds at first like all sorts of complex
things, but turns out not to be. Symptoms are that the CD-ROM drive runs in
DOS compatibility mode, sometimes is recognized and sometimes not. Try a
cold boot from a known clean virus boot disk and see if it detects any
viruses, you might be surprised. (Don't just run a scan while running
Windows, it may not detect it.)

Susan Sutherland

>From: Kyle Elmblade <[log in to unmask]>
>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]>
> > 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.

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