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…