Re: Strange IDE connection wont allow internet acces

Hi, PeanutHead.

Mixing HDD interfaces can cause some weird problems. When I got my first IDE drives about 10 years ago, after a decade or more of SCSI-only, it took a lot of fiddling with cables, BIOS settings and editing Boot.ini - and several re-installs of Win2K! - to get my system running. And then every hardware or OS update triggered another round of the same frustrations. Since finally getting to all-SATA II a couple of years ago, thing have gone much more smoothly. Since I have only a single computer, I don't have a wide range of experience, but I can offer a few thoughts that may help.

Older motherboards insisted in booting from IDE, even if SCSI HDDs were installed, too. Today's mobos should have updated BIOSes that handle this much better; we don't often hear about such problems with mismatched HDD interfaces. But yours may have some BIOS setting that needs to be set or tweaked to skip your IDE drive and boot from the SATA drive where you have your System Partition. The System Partition is typically the first partition on the first HDD, but that can vary. And the definition of "first HDD" can be unclear when there is a mix of IDE and SATA drives.

Both SCSI and SATA HDDs have often needed to have "mass storage drivers" loaded from a floppy disk by pressing <F6> during the early part of Windows Setup. Each successive version of Windows has had more "native" drivers, and each generation of motherboards and chipsets has also had less compatibility problems. But there is still the possibility that you need to load drivers during the Setup process, especially if your System Partition is not on that old standard IDE drive connected as the Master drive on the first IDE channel.

I'm not a techie and I don't fully understand the "enumeration" process that identifies hard drives and partitions during boot-up. I have found it very difficult to reconcile the designations of drives among the BIOS, Disk Management, Boot.ini and the BCD. "Disk 0" in Drive Management is not always the HDD designated in the BIOS as the current boot device. And neither is "rdisk(0)" in WinXP's Boot.ini.

I hope these comments help you find a solution. When you find it, please post back for the benefit of others. Good luck.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64

"peanuthead" <guest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:8556bd37ffb849fd611a4cd714dca71c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi,

I have been working with vista x64 for several months now and
everything seemed to work just fine up until recently when something
really strange started happening.

I have 3 physical HDDs 2 SATA and 1 IDE, vista is installed on the
smallest SATA drive which is about 80gb and has no secondary partitions,
the other SATA is 300gb and is split in half and the IDE drive is also
split in half but none of them have any OS installed on them.

One day I turned on my PC and discovered that the 2 partitions for the
IDE drive were missing from the "Computer" screen, so I went first to
the device manager to double check and the disk didnt show up in there
either. After that I went to the admin tools in the disk management
section and it was nowhere to be found.

After many attempts of fiddling with it, in the BIOS and in vista
itself i finally got the disk to show up again by connecting the IDE
cable to the secondary IDE slot in the mobo but then a new problem came
up and this one I have no idea how to fix or why its happening.

Everything works fine except that I cannot acces the internet, I know
its not a router problem because I am using it right now on this laptop
to write this, I can acces the local network just fine, its just that I
cant acces the internet.

When I go to the device manager to see whats going on with the network
device, when I click on properties for NVIDIA network controller
(default from the mobo) it says there are no drivers installed for this
device. But If i unplugg the IDE HDD it works fine and I can acces the
net normally.

I think that sums everything up, I hope somebody has any clue as to why
this is happening, thanks a lot in advance and here are my comp specs

MOBO - ASUS P5N-E SLI
6BG ram
1 IDE 200gb HDD
SATA 300 gb HDD
SATA 80 gb HDD (where vista lives)
dual NVIDIA Gforce 9800

Thanks


--
peanuthead

.

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