Lost all drives except A:

[dali]

Hi Gents,
I am hoping you could help me. I have been troubleshooting a missing cdrom issue on my inlaws PC its a 503082-001 (AST) Advantage 9311( P/166) running 95. I have upgrade the BIOS and succesfully installed an IDEINF.upg patch for a known issue on dissappearing cdrom's to NO success. Now I have managed to lose the c: drive. What I did was run the patch and then went to windows C:\windows\system\ and renamed the PCI.vxd to PCIorig.vxd. On bootup I only see the keyboard and the floppy being recognized. I then get a message to insert bootable media. I have tried a bootable floppy , but for some reason I can't get to the c: it responds invalid drive. I have checked the BIOS and there is no drive being recognized. Any help is greatly appreciated....

[Alfons]

Hi Gents,
I am hoping you could help me. I have been troubleshooting a missing cdrom issue on my inlaws PC its a 503082-001 (AST) Advantage 9311( P/166) running 95. I have upgrade the BIOS and succesfully installed an IDEINF.upg patch for a known issue on dissappearing cdrom's to NO success. Now I have managed to lose the c: drive. What I did was run the patch and then went to windows C:\windows\system\ and renamed the PCI.vxd to PCIorig.vxd. On bootup I only see the keyboard and the floppy being recognized. I then get a message to insert bootable media. I have tried a bootable floppy , but for some reason I can't get to the c: it responds invalid drive. I have checked the BIOS and there is no drive being recognized. Any help is greatly appreciated....
I'd check all the hardware connections - power and data cables, then since you've flashed the BIOS, you should make sure that both of your IDE channels are enabled and everything's set up to automatically detect your hard drives. The automatic detection would be in the CMOS Settings (first BIOS Setup page) for Primary Master setup. There might be a Setup Menu item entitled "Automatic Detection of Hard Drive", or something similar, and if there is, use it - this will put in a User Defined entry in the CMOS Setup page for all drives that are detected.

Do you have a manual for the motherboard?

[1966]

Hi Gents,
I am hoping you could help me. I have been troubleshooting a missing cdrom issue on my inlaws PC its a 503082-001 (AST) Advantage 9311( P/166) running 95. I have upgrade the BIOS and succesfully installed an IDEINF.upg patch for a known issue on dissappearing cdrom's to NO success. Now I have managed to lose the c: drive. What I did was run the patch and then went to windows C:\windows\system\ and renamed the PCI.vxd to PCIorig.vxd. On bootup I only see the keyboard and the floppy being recognized. I then get a message to insert bootable media. I have tried a bootable floppy , but for some reason I can't get to the c: it responds invalid drive. I have checked the BIOS and there is no drive being recognized. Any help is greatly appreciated....


I agree with Alfons advice, sounds like something in the bios wont let you see
the hd. Any yellow exclamation marks or question marks in device manager? Also you might want to undo all your connections and reboot and see if the bios will recognize each component as its added back to the computer. While thats time consuming you could go into device manager and remove each one and let Windows find it. My the way does the bios battery check OK? Just some things to consider if you haven't already.

[Alfons]

Checking the Device Manager or any other Windows component will be most difficult if the drive itself isn't seen :D :D

[1966]

Checking the Device Manager or any other Windows component will be most difficult if the drive itself isn't seen :D :D


You never know til you try :p

[dali]

You never know til you try :p

Alfons is correct if the drive is not seen...Windows will not boot up so Device manager would be out the question; however, I was able to reset the CMOS via the Jumpers. I am now able to see the HD and boot up with windows. I am back witht the issue where the cdrom is not seen......Thanks again for the input.......dali

[jdc2000]

Download the files to create a Win98 boot diskette from http://www.bootdisk.com Once you have a boot diskette, boot using that and see if a CD in the drive can be accessed. If it can, then you have a software problem that is preventing access to the drive in Windows. If you can't, then you have a hardware problem. If it is a software problem, it is either from the patch(es) you installed, or it could be from a virus. Scan for viruses with the latest update to your antivirus software. You may have to do this using emergency boot/scan floppies, since some of the viruses that can cause this problem are boot sector viruses.

[dali]

Download the files to create a Win98 boot diskette from http://www.bootdisk.com Once you have a boot diskette, boot using that and see if a CD in the drive can be accessed. If it can, then you have a software problem that is preventing access to the drive in Windows. If you can't, then you have a hardware problem. If it is a software problem, it is either from the patch(es) you installed, or it could be from a virus. Scan for viruses with the latest update to your antivirus software. You may have to do this using emergency boot/scan floppies, since some of the viruses that can cause this problem are boot sector viruses.


The problem was on its post where the cdrom was not being recognized. I was able to bypass this by slaving the cdrom to the HD. The post now sees the drive and I used a bootdisk to access the cdrom, from there I upgraded the PC to 98. I left the cdrom as a slave to the HDD since it did not pose a problem and it works fine. The root cause I belive wasthe combination of the motherboard and the retail version of 95 where it disabled the secondary IDE channel. I believe that by upgrading to 98 this becomes a non-issue.

I hope this helps anyone out there that has this very same issue.....