Question XP Home re-install cannot find serial ATA devices

[ImWolf]

MSI K9NBPM2-FID MB
2 WD 500G SATA Hard Drives
1 SG 40G IDE Hard Drive
1 Teac CDR Drive

About 18 months ago I re-Installed XP Home with a "slipstream" CD created (and used before) with Nlite. I had also hit F6 during install and provided the additional SATA/RAID drivers just for good measure. I also later installed the NV61XX chipset software from inside XP.

Since then, I've been seeing 2 new alerts during boot and when XP starts. First, the bios flash screen suddenly started displaying "Not enough space in runtime area. Symbios my not be available." (or something very close to that).

Then when WinXP starts, I get 5 pop up alerts. First is a small balloon that says "Found New Hardware" described either as IDE Controller, or Nvidia Nforce 430/410 Serial ATA Controller. Immediately after this a larger box pops up saying "Cannot install this hardware", "cannot find the device specified", "Nvidia Nforce 430/410 Serial ATA Controller".

I get these errors twice, once for each of the SATA drives? So at every re-start I deal with the "new hardware found" and "cannot install" balloons and dialog boxes. Then finally comes a pop up saying "Error installing new hardware, some of your devices may not work properly".

WinXP is installed on one of these SATA drives. Device Mgr. shows no yellow exclamations, nor does it list any Serial ATA controllers. Device manager does list 3 Primary and 3 Secondary IDE controllers, and a Standard duel channel PCI IDE controller, all with Microsoft drivers. Also, under SCSI and RAID controllers I have 2 IDE Controllers listed, both with "Unknown drivers".

I recall this exact scenario the first time I added the 2 SATA drives to the system about 2 years prior, but I don't recall how I resolved it. I have downloaded and attempted to update the SCSI/RAID IDE drivers with the newest versions out there from both the MSI and nVidia web sites, but during the update the same error box pops up mid-way thru saying "Cannot find the device specified".

What am I doing wrong?

Wolf

 

[AllanGH]

Did you, by chance, do a BIOS update before this all started?

 

[ImWolf]

just install the ones that came with the windows disc. if they work, leave it. xp is long dead. thank god. it's time to let it go.

If I could update drivers, I would not have started this thread asking why I'm not able to update drivers.

 

[ImWolf]

Did you, by chance, do a BIOS update before this all started?

Nope, the BIOS update was an effort to solve another nag.... which it did.

 

[AllanGH]

OK.....was curious about that aspect of it.

My brain won't leave it alone.....LOL....and I'll probably be mulling this over while I'm driving out to Los Angeles, this afternoon.

 

[ImWolf]

Since my last post I've D/L a few different Sata/Raid drivers all from the Nvidia site that I thought were workable.... but the same dialog box persists.... "cannot find the device specified".

Let me ask a stewpid Q...... In Device Manager, I should be trying to update the controllers listed under "SCSI and RAID"..... right?

 

[AllanGH]

Where you can, any device that shows up under device manager that has an exclamation point, or other icon indicating that there is a driver issue with it.

So, yes.

Ideally, that is. You are, admittedly, in the situation where device support has been cut for the OS, and are relying on legacy support in current or archived driver offerings from the relevant vendors.

 

[ImWolf]

In my case Allen, there are no exclamation or other "sore thumbs" in Device Mgr.

The two IDE Controllers listed under "SCSI and RAID" are UNKNOWN, with UNKNOWN drivers, even though XP is installed on one of these devices.

The big nag for me, and why I asked for help here is because of the constant, infernal, unrelenting dialog boxes at start-up. And even though XP is no longer supported by the vendor, finding drivers and such is not a big issue.

I'm sure there are many former XP guru's on this forum and others... so I'm a bit dismayed that I haven't been helped more on this Q.....

I suppose they are now all busy fixing their new and improved OS's?

:b

 

[AllanGH]

Well, I would hope that a good portion of folks have thrown-in the towel and started doing Linux installations, instead, but that's not realistic.

Hmmmm....the cats are freaking out over a small earthquake that just rolled through here...time to go settle them down.

 

[ImWolf]

I checked Windows Event Viewer for anything that might hint at a fix, but no "events" were logged during driver update efforts.

Are there other tools at my disposal to reveal why driver update seems to start, but then shuts down b4 completing?

 

[AllanGH]

I'm wondering if you can start the installation from the command prompt screen?

I don't remember if XP has that facility or not, but you can try that, if it does.

Hopefully, if it outputs error/failure messages to the console, at least that will be informative enough to give you a direction to take in attempting a resolution.

 

[ImWolf]

That's a good idea Allen.... I was wondering the same thing at work tonight.

Are your cats all better now?

Wolf

 

[Deleted member 14196]

No the gurus aren’t fixing their new os because the new ones work. They are most likely having fun playing games while you’re messing around with an ancient operating system wasting your time.

You would be better off running Linux and playing games with wine or steam. Better yet use windows 10 for free and activate it when you can afford to

 

[ImWolf]

"No the gurus aren’t fixing their new os because the new ones work "

Windows 10..... 1129 pages of problems
Windows 8.... 714 pages
Windows 7..... 2727 pages
Vista....... 352
XP...... almost 3300 pages (but that's over 17 years)

Maybe you're right though..... I should prolly upgrade to Vista!!!

 

[ImWolf]

Now that’s the silliest comparison I’ve ever seen windows XP is had more problems than any of those OSs you’re not being truthful to say the least so have lots of fun with your crap OS not working

Your thinly veiled insults against all the good people here is what really makes me angry and may be why you’re not getting help

(quickly edited version)
You just let me know when you have that fixed OK LOL 😂

Not being truthful???
Thinly veiled insults???

First off, you owe me an apology

Then..... go away. All you are now is an annoyance. You certainly didn't come here to help me resolve a problem I have with my driver issue. Why are you even in the XP area of this forum?

Go play games somewhere else.

Wolf

 

[ImWolf]

So now you're deleting your posts....... too much truth there?

"Apology accepted Captain Needa"

:b

 

[AllanGH]

LOL! The cats are more settled since the little rattle we got.

Reading back through....

Linux Mint 19.1 on that disgusting little 40G drive does seem to boot up and be ready to use about 10 times as fast as XP, so I surmise Linux has a lot less code or a lot better design behind it than WinBloze.

In addition to MANY other advantages.... 😉

 

[ImWolf]

LOL! The cats are more settled since the little rattle we got.

Reading back through....
In addition to MANY other advantages.... 😉

I have yet to discover these Allen...... this is gonna be lengthy...

First time I installed a Linux OS was about 18 months ago and it was Mint 18 on the same system I have now, but the install or the software was buggy. It ran fine at first, but with every re-start I noticed little things not right.... or not the same as previously. After a dozen or so re-boots I was dealing with freezes, ghost images where app's were overlapping or something..... then it just wouldn't start at all.

This really twerked me, cuz I wanted out of Windows! I wanted Linux to save me. All 4 versions of MS Win's I had used to this point had the same thing in common..... the OS degraded over time to the point where you just had to format and re-install everything. It's no secret that MS has not been testing their junk for some time, and using the customers as guinea pigs to refine the product through feedback.

So at this point (18 months ago), I knew that the duel boot Grub was on D: where I installed Mint, and my original XP MBR should still be on C:.... so I changed the boot disks in Bios and guess what..... XP wouldn't start. "No system found".... JOY!

After spending way too much time trying to cure the XP install with Recovery console, copying original SAM, SYSTEM, DEFAULT, etc, and then using various "boot recovery" disks.... it became evident that I was now formatting both drives!

I not only lost Mint.... I lost XP too somehow.

So I was not eager to try Linux again..... and then, about 6 weeks ago, my bank threw me for a loop. They had just upgraded security and I could no longer login unless I upgraded to a newer version of web browser.... in this case FireFox. But I already had the latest version of FireFox supported by XP. Ever see the movie Catch22? I was not ammused!

So I thought, it's been a while, perhaps the newer version of Linux Mint 19.1 might let me access my banking at least, so I installed that, and I've used it since then without the previous Mint problems. I also used Wine and VMware to install other app's in Mint, but my preferred accounting programs were not available for Mint, or wouldn't run/install properly.

It became a major pain to keep switching back and forth between OS's to do online banking in one, but my normal bookkeeping in the other. If I could figure out how to save files between the two different file systems I would prolly be using Mint most of the time..... but that's not possible from my experience, and I just have too much old history on NTFS that I can't let go..... and if I save a file with the Linux file system, XP can't use it.

So anyway, long story a bit longer, about 2 weeks ago I found a spoof setting for FireFox that makes my bank think I'm running V.58, when I'm actually running V.53. so I can now login again and continue doing everything I used to do with my finances using XP and those programs.

So I really haven't booted into Linux much over the past few weeks except for trying to fix that crazy new clock issue..... I spend the rest of my free "fix-it" time trying to resolve all these pop-ups XP has been giving me for 18 months now!

 

[AllanGH]

Well, as to the clock issue, the "standard" Linux method of setting the system time is to set the hardware clock to UTC/GMT, and specify a time zone offset for time display.

Now, if you're using windows as a dual boot, then things are going to be messed-up, since windows, by default, sets the hardware clock to the time zone value. I'm not certain if there's a way around that, on the windows side, since I've always used the UNIX/Linux way of doing things.

An additional thought occurs to me....
If you set yourself up with a shared data storage drive; which is NTFS formatted, you can save documents and data files to that, in Linux, and be able to access it through windows.

I don't know if Mint has NTFS-3G enabled by default, or not, but you might look into it, if you do want the NTFS access on Mint.

 

[ImWolf]

I am happy to report the pop-up boxes are gone, and everything appears to be very normal.... and very fast!

Spent much time playing with DevCon.exe, a command line utility for dealing with device drivers. It taught me a lot, but I couldn't get the "update" or "install" commands to work. The syntax is quite cryptic and in some cases you even need to edit the INF file you want to use.

While trying to find help on this, I came across DPINST32.EXE (also available in the 64 flavor). This is a stand-alone driver package installer. I simply copied the file to where my updated drivers were stored (which I could never install b4), double clicked it, and in no time my drivers definitely changed! You can also use this utility from the command line with option switches.

At first it left behind a yellow ? device under SCSI and RAID, but since I don't have these things in use I just uninstalled it to get rid of that "found new hardware" box.

Device Manager now shows 2 Nvidia Serial ATA controllers under the ATA/ATAPI section, along with 1 Primary and 1 Secondary IDE Channel, and a single "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller". The SCSI/RAID parent is gone.

I don't have any speed test stuff, but from a cold machine I'm now seeing the Windows start page in less than 15 seconds..... add 10 to that if I just let Grub run it's course. That's perty fast for this old bucket!

Happy, happy...... Joy, joy

 

[ImWolf]

BTW..... I did perform a regedit a few days ago to force XP to use UTC instead of local time.... the jury is still out on that fix.

And thanks for the hint on saving files in NTFS during Mint sessions..... I'm still quite ignorant of all I can do with that O/S. I'll have to check that one out!

 

[AllanGH]

Long path to the resolution. Glad you got it solved.

Now, fix your clock. 😉

 

[AllanGH]

You do have the advantages of those who went before you.

There was a time when NTFS wasn't even readable on a Linux machine.

 

[ImWolf]

Long path to the resolution. Glad you got it solved.

Now, fix your clock. 😉

Yea Allen.... after all this trouble I was a bit startled at how quick the problem went away with that dpinst32 program.... at first I didn't believe it was over. :b

 

[ImWolf]

You do have the advantages of those who went before you.

There was a time when NTFS wasn't even readable on a Linux machine.

Come to think about it, the last time I was running MSmoney installed in Linux, I did try to save the output file to my XP drive but Money wouldn't find the drive even though I had already mounted it in the file manager.

This is probably a subject for another thread.... thanks for all your time.

Wolf