Win2k CD-RW trouble

[Macbeth]

Hi,

I have a very strange problem since last week.

First, here is a description of my system:

AMD Athlon 1200C,
Gigabyte GA-7ZX-H,
Micron 512 Mo PC-133 cas-2 (2x 256Mo),
ATI Radeon 7500,
Adaptec AHA-2930CU,
Realtek 8139 lan adapter,
Western Digital WD-400BB ATA/100 40Go,
Sony DVD DDU1621,
Sony CD-RW CRX140S.

HD is master primary IDE
DVD is master secondery IDE
CD-RW is Scsi Id 1 (used to be Id 0 but I changed it just to try) and adapter is Id 7

OS is Windows 2000 Pro sp2

Here is the description of my problem:

My CD-RW always worked well until last week when I installed the DVD. Since then, when I boot in windows, there is no drive letter for the CD-RW and it is not in the device manager. In the device manager, if I search for hardware modification, Now the CD-RW is found and I have a drive letter. That is when I boot windows without any cd-rom in the CD-RW drive. But if I have a cd-rom in that drive at boot time, the problem does not occur. ????? I don't understand!

Can anyone help me?

Thanx!

[Macbeth]

Yes I forgot to mation it... It is at the same time that I also installed the Radeon 7500...

[ayoub_ibrahim]

just checking here but have you terminated your cdrw drive??

[Marshmallowman]

one thing why not put your DVD drive on its own channel as master, that way it won't slow down your hardrive.

as to your cd/rw problems
am i right in thinking your scsi cd/rw system has not changed, you just added a dvd and 7500.

if you are NOT using ACPI, it may be worth checking to see if the 7500 has started sharing an interrupt with something(scsi card).
it may be worth moving the scsi card to a different slot.

also check your scsi bios for options for cdroms, eg allow bootable cdrom...etc(probably won't come up because you don't have a scsi hdd)

also check your normal bios for which is the default boot device, try disabling alternative boot device for now..

and defintely follow ayoub_ibrahim suggestion, termination and parity are the scourge of scsi systems

[Macbeth]

Thanx you guys!

First, yes my scsi cdrw is terminated... but I don't know what you mean by parity?

Second The DVD is master on my second IDE conector... thanx for the advice... but I already knew about this one.

Third I did not make any change to my scsi system, I only aded the DVD and the ATI card...

Fourth In the bios, the ATI card has IRQ11 but in win2k it has IRQ9... the same as many other devices but I gess that is the way win2k works because I don't have any conflicts...

I noticed something strange tho while investigating... My motherboard use a VIA chipset with ATA100 support but win2k has configured my two IDE drives as SCSI drives. Very strange because my HD is ata100 and the DVD is ata33. Even if I play with the driver version of my busmaster...

The only way I managed to work around that my problem is by using the IDETOOL from VIA and reconfigured the two devices as ATA100 and ATA33 respectively. Only then would my cdrw would reapear.

But still in the registry windows has my DVD and HD under the SCSI section...

Do you know why win2k acts like that?

If you have any info you are wellcome!

Thanx!

[Marshmallowman]

does your board have on board RAID, for example a highpoint or promise controller?, these will show up as scsi.

and the highpoint controllers do not like CDRoms fullstop

parity is for scsi communictation, usually parity is enabled.
(device and controller should both be enabled)
but if you had no problems before it probably is not that.

are you using the latest via 4 in 1?

[Macbeth]

Thanx again for your help...

No I don't have any RAID support on my motherboard...

Yes I tried the latest 4in1 drivers but it would simply not install properly the IDE driver... Strange don't you think? During installation, everithing seem to go well but after the reboot of my system, if I check in the device manager of win2k, nothing has changed.

I had to donwload the "manual" instalation driver, file 580_3012.zip, that I found on the VIA web site, and only then would it install properly but still my problem was not solved by these new drivers... I tried many many things before finding how to work around it but still I don't understand why the heck is in my registry these two drives are considered has SCSI.

If I do a fresh install of win2k, in the device manager, my HD and my DVD are indentified as IDE drives but are under the SCSI section in the registry.

After I installed the drivers from VIA, In the device manager, these two drives are identified as SCSI drives...

It works now but still did you ever heard of such a bizare thing?

Thanx!