ND-3500 not recognized by Vista despite installing from it

Yeah so I've been playing the install-vista-game recently much thanks to my ODD's. I did manage to persuade Vista that my 3500A did exist at one point using hacked Intel ICH8 ACHI drivers but it forgot all about it after a reboot.

I thought I had the problem narrowed down to my switch to AHCI which is suppsedly unsupported by Intel altough Asus claims it will work in Vista, which it does, using standard MS drivers. (For the record it works in XP too, just edit the .inf to install the Intel ICH8R-driver)

So I reverted to defaults (IDE-mode) and did a complete reinstall of Vista.
Standard EVERYTHING. 100% MS-drivers, and despite this my NEC does not exist.

I can find it in the device manager, it installs drivers for it but if I try to use it nothing happens for a while, Windows freezes for a bit and the unit is deleted from the device manager. My oooold JLMS 165H works just fine however. In "ACHI-mode" and IDE-mode.

The funny thing is of course that I installed Vista from my NEC...

A cable issue, maybe? Then PIO operation (during installation) would be OK, but DMA operation (Vista) impossible...? Just a thought. So many issues can find their origin in things as trival as a damaged cable, or not properly seated...

Both units are running UMDA2 in XP. It is a mystery.

Weird. Just for the record I have a ND-3500A in Vista which works OK. (Haven't burned anything in it yet, but it reads OK). Anyway, how did you connect it to the ICH8R, was it with a IDE -> SATA converter? (Maybe I'm mixing things up, but I thought the ICH8R didn't have any IDE-ports).

My mobo have the usual array of PATA-connectors, primary and secondary IDE and floppy. And I too have read that ICH8 doesnt have native PATA-support, but either that was wrong or Asus fitted some small bridge chip somewhere.

DVDRW and DVD-ROM sit at secondary IDE, master and slave respectively. I've tried disconnecting my 165H but that produced nothing, except I couldnt use that either
Not that I use it anyways, the noise is terrible. But anyway. I suppose I could put it on primary IDE but it should not make any difference. But this is Microsoft...

I had heard some rumours that people were having some problems getting some ODD drives working properly with ICH8 and Vista. I went for a ICH7 board to be safe.

There is a file on Intels site that is supposed to fix issues with devices not being found with Vista.
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scri...0&submit=Go%21

Sorry I can't help, but burning problems made me give up on the latest 32-bit Vista RC2 build. Not that the drive disappeared, but I got very bad CPU-Usage and Buffer problems. Guess this was related to the MS IDE drivers with my nForce3. 64-bit didn't have this problem with the same mobo and 32-bit did work fine on an Ati/ULi board that I used for a couple months.

Another possibilty is that they have put another controller for IDE in (that's the way I thought it was usually done). Like a normail PCI or PCIe controller, not a IDE->SATA bridge.

Anyway, I'll have to figure this out later this week when my new computer arrives!

It appears the ODD's are handled by the JMicron controller. I get a quick notice at bootup that my NEC and JLMS are handled by "JMicron SATAII-to-PCIE-IDE". Yay for Engrish.

Installing Intel drivers do nothing, I'll see if JMicron have any drivers. Yet I do not understand why the DVDROM works and my DVDRW does not.

It appears to be working now after several boots with it present, and it even burns. What I did was disable the JMicron-controller in BIOS, re-enabling it then got Vista to install ATA-channels and ATA-drives. Same drivers as before only now they work. Peculiar.

This may help:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=210005

Hope it helps,

DriveShaft.

See this MS TID. Seems to work for Vista (32bit) or XP. You may only have one entry (UpperLimit). Restart is not required. Delete the device in device manager, re-add and voila.

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=k...4060&x=12&y=13