Help a poor moron fix his computer.

[sullen]

This is a long story and I appreciate anyone who reads and offers some help.

I bought a Hauppauge WinTV Go card yesterday. I spent most of the day messing around trying to get a good capture. I always had a white noise in the background. Someone mentioned in a post to update to 4in1 drivers. I tried that, but there was an error in the registry part. I don't think they installed. I then went and downloaded the new Hauppauge drivers and installed them. The capture sucked worse so I uninstalled the who thing. Somewhere in all of this mess I lost my two ROMs. I have a DVD-ROM master and a CDRW slave. They do not show up in My Computer, but when I boot they light up and I see them load. I tried to re-install them, but Windows does not see them as new Plug and Play hardware. How the hell did I do this and more importantly how do I fix it. I have looked around and am really confused about the right solution to my problem.

I also have the following two messages under System Properties Performance:

Compatibility mode paging reduces overall system performance.
Drive X is using an MS-DOS compatibility mode file system.

I know that it has to do something with the drivers and them being set in Windwos. I have Windows 98. I do know that the driver for the DVD-Rom came off the Windows 98 disk. Any help is supremely appreciated!

[d4n13l]

Ive had this problem before: I had to reinstall Windoze after MANY hours spent on trying to fix it - GRRRRR.
Have you tried booting into safe mode yet? That may reset some flags which *may* fix some of the problem.
I dont know the specifics of why but what I think has happened is that there has been some sort of driver conflict, be it a bad install or whatever, which has caused windows to revert to a basic "safe" MSDOS compatibility mode, which is why the two CD/DVD drives arent being mounted and the HDD works very slowly.
If you do manage to fix it I will be very interested to hear how and why it happens. This is quite a common problem with Win9x It happened to me once just because I loaded a f$%^&*£ MSDOS startup disk!
Also, try using the Windoze diagnostic tool - Dr Watson.
Open a prompt and type:
drwatson
to run it. It will probably open on the system tray - it has different options that you can use so try them all.

P.S.
What happened to your signature?

[sullen]

Ok. Some advancement to a degree. I used my CDRW floppy to load the device driver for it. After I did that and rebooted I can now see and access my DVD and CDRW from My Computer, but they are still not listed in the device manager. I know have more error messages. They are the same as the ones above except drive C, D, and E replace the X in the above message about the driver using an MS-DOS compatibility mode file system. C=hard drive, D=DVD, E=CDRW. Closer...but still....no phallic cigar.

PS I usually save my signature for humorous posts such as this one:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=61383&forum=6

[PC Master]

This happens all too many times on win9x systems. The solution is simple.

Go into System Properties (CTRL-Break) and check the device manager.Delete all devices under Hard Disk Controllers. Restart in safe mode. Go back into System Properties (in safe mode). Delete any devices under Hard Disk Controllers.

Restart your computer. When Windows loads, it will detect "new hardware" and find your IDE controller(s). You may be prompted for your Win9x CD or some other drivers. Restart. Windows will initialize the hard disk controllers, and in so doing, will reload your CDRW and DVD drives. Note: The drive letters may not be the same as before (that is, if you altered them from their defaults), so you may need to reset them. To do this, go under System Properties, CD-ROM tab.

Hope this helps.

[d4n13l]

hehe, that's the spirit.
Did Dr Watson find anything wrong? If so, then you can use the info to contact M$ support.

[sullen]

No, Dr. Watson was out to lunch on problems. Did a reinstall of Win98 and guess what? The stupid thing is still messed up. I put in a DVD to test out the drive and tried to open it with Smartripper and got an ASPI error. That is my next avenue. Tomorrow though. My room mate needs the computer all evening and I was up WAY past my bedtime last night trying to get the fix in.

[Mad Dog Fargo]

When you say that you are reloading your 4-in-1 drivers, are you referring to Motherboard CHipset drivers from the manufacturer? If this is the case, I may have some insight into what happened:

(* This is the simplified version)
SOMETIMES mobo drivers loaded from a manufacturer CD include non PnP PCI Bridge drivers, or similar, that helps control how your CPU, RAM and expansion cards interact. If you RE-LOAD these, your system must FIRST detect the bridge BEFORE it will detect any devices beyond the bridge. Next time you have to do this, try allowing WinDOZE to detect the newly loaded PCI bridge drivers ONLY at first, and then RE-BOOT the PC. After reboot, the OS should be able to correctly detect everything else (* all PnP items that is) beyond the bridge, including ISA and PCI devices.

If I might make a recommendation, try this:
(* Assuming that you have successfully loaded the 4-in-1 drivers and backed up your registry already)
- Re-Boot the PC in SAFE MODE
Go into device manager and remove ALL devices\device categories to force a complete system device re-detect
- *IF you are asked if you want to remove driver files no longer needed by the removed devices, say NO. This SHOULD leave the needed drivers in your WinDOZE directory, but it would be good to have driver files handy in case some need to be reinstalled anyway
- Re-Boot PC normally and make sure the PCI bridge device is correctly detected and installed FIRST
- Re-Boot PC normally and see if all other devices are detected properly

This may not be the aswer you are looking for, but it was found because of a similar problem at work that forced me to research this solution.

- Mad Dog Fargo

[sullen]

I thought about that earlier, but wanted to try other things first because the DVD and CDRW do appear in safe mode in the Device Manager. I did not successfully install the 4 in 1 drivers.

[holistic]

Don't wish to repeat the others but i had similar problem and traced it to $hitty ATA drivers for my ATA66 controller card.
If your board has a ATA66/100 controller chip , may be - HiPoint or Promise (goto the motherboard manufacturer webpage it will tell you in the tech spec.) goto to specific ATA controller site and download latest drivers .
just an idea !

[sullen]

SUCCESS!!!!!! Sometimes it is the little things or the basics for most that I had overlooked. I assume when I didn't get the 4in1 drivers installed completely, I am not even sure if they were the right ones, it yanked my HD controller Driver. I was without the driver so none of the IDE controllers were loading because they weren't told to. I finally figured out that I had to "update" it in Safe Mode. I also had to revert back to a back up from when I had reinstalled Win98. What the difference was I could not tell you, but thanks to the wonderful people here who gave me fresh ideas and coached a novice computer guy through such an experience. And the driver for the HD is a HiPoint.
Again, thanks.

[d4n13l]

Hey, look on the bright side - You have a clean install of Windoze now.

[sullen]

This is true. It reset a couple of little annoying things that had happened over the years. The main one was the network sign on everytime I booted up.
Thanks again.