IDE Controller Question

[Aunty Em]

I'm trying to help a friend sort out a problem with her computer.

She keeps getting this message(she wrote this down foe me):

Standard IDE/ESDI Hard Disk Controller
This device cannot find any free Interupt Request (IRQ) resources(Cope12? can't read handwriting)
To use device you must disable other

And there is an exclamation mark on the IDE Controller in Device Manager indicating a conflict.

Can anyone explain exactly what is happening. I believe it is 2 IDE devices trying to use the same resources for some reason.

But how do I go about finding out and sorting it out?

I have not yet seen the comp but it sounds like she has other problems as well. She got it second-hand from someone who built it, but has no driver disc for the motherboard. She recently formatted the drive and reinstalled windows - but not drivers?! Could this be related to the problem? she has no idea what make the motherboard is so I'll have to look inside and find out and go see if I can download them from the manufacturer.

 

[Luis G]

It looks like an old IDE controller, those are likely to be ISA cards configured thru jumpers. Tell her to remove the other cards in the system, and then proceed to install each one again.

Also, some old boards include an IDE controller in the motherboard, if she tries to use yet another old IDE controller it will conflict with the existent.

And thinking it once again, if the hard drive works, there should be no conflict at all. So either windows is being picky with it, or the controller is using a different IRQ/Address than the one windows is detecting.

PS. yeah, i know how confusing i can be, just read each paragraph as a different post

 

[Aunty Em]

She doesn't even know which board is the mobo so I shall have to do it for her and hopefully show her along the way as she's interested. But I won't be able to do anything berfore Monday.

I didn't find that confusing at all. I'm background reading on PC Architecture -IDE so that I can better understand the problem.

 

[HomeLAN]

Best bet - There's a driver for the plug and play BIOS (or IDE chipset) on the mobo. Either find and install that driver or change the "plug and play aware OS" setting in the BIOS. My guess is that Windows is trying to assign resources and getting confused by a driverless BIOS trying to do the same thing.

 

[Luis G]

Standard IDE/ESDI Hard Disk Controller

Just a little observation, which leads me to think it is an old ISA/VLB IDE controller (no drivers and no plug and play).

 

[HomeLAN]

Entirely possible. It would just surprise me a little, since I haven't seen a mobo without onboard IDE in about 6 or 7 years.

 

[Aunty Em]

I'll probably remove the cards, install the drivers for the board, once I know which ones I need, then re-install the cards one by one and see what happens. Thanks for your help, I'll let you know what happens.

I'll also see if she has the manual for the mobo as well so I can see what jumpers it's got.