More Windows madness

[ciphergoth]

I have to get the cable modem failing under Windows before I can call support about it. My efforts to do this are hampered by Windows failing in new and interesting ways.

This time, it has lost the CD-ROM drive. I've looked in the Device Manager, and it can't see anything hanging off the secondary IDE. I've tried disabling and re-enabling it, to no effect. Linux can still see and use the drive just fine, so it's not a hardware problem. Without the CD-ROM drive, I can't make it do very much...

Does anyone have any idea what might cause a problem like this, or what I can do to fix it? Or am I stuck with finally buying a backup device and re-installing Windows?

Comments

[babysimon]

What do you need a backup device for? Can't you back up to /dev/hdaX?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that in my experience Windows doesn't like being installed second. As I understand it, there's a danger it'll attack my Linux partition... and I don't have enough disk space anywhere on the network to back that up.

[babysimon]

I've only done the dual boot thing with W9x, but I've never had much of a problem with it - it'll kill LILO but you have a boot floppy/cd, right?

But mistrusting windows is probably never a bad thing.

[lovingboth]

Presumably the BIOS sees it, and it's readable from DOS?

What happens if you physically disconnect the drive, boot, refresh devices, shut down, reconnect, restart and refresh again? What if you try it on the primary controller?

Memory is telling me that there is something that causes this sort of problem - sure it's correctly set up as a master (possibly master no slave which some drives want to be told) if it's the only device on the secondary controller? Proper OSs - DOS and Linux - will see it if it's not, but Windows won't.

Backup devices are useful: a CD writer should be in everyone's PC.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, it's a laptop, and the CD drive is wired in, so physically disconnecting it is not an option. The BIOS does see it. DOS doesn't have the drivers to see it.

It used to work. It has mysteriously failed.

It would take a *lot* of CD burning to back up my data. I don't think it's a practical way to go - some sort of tape streamer is called for.

[lovingboth]

Ah, a laptop. Expensive doorstops, IME. When they're not being dropped or nicked. If it's in warranty, shout at the makers.

DOS should just need a generic EIDE CD-ROM driver (virtually all of them work with everyone else's) + MSCDEX.

There must be a Windows PC in the flat somewhere, mustn't there?

The advantage of CD blanks is that a) they tend to be faster to read than tape, b) the format should last longer than any tape format, c) they're readable in any CD-ROM drive whereas tape drives have an annoying habit of ending up only reading things they've written (and how many people even have DAT drives, for example), d) they're not magnetic, e) they're now commodity items, whereas nearly all tapes are proprietary, f) that also means they're dirt cheap, and g) there exist programs like Ghost and Drive Image which will chuck data at them in 650M chunks.

For me, all that outweighs having to use more blanks than I would tapes. The only alternative I'd consider is swappable hard drives.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Given that a 30Gb tape streamer plus three tapes looks to be costing me 600 quid, you might be right...

[ex-meta.livejournal.com]

Three 30GB hard drives would be less than that...

Another option is a DVD-RAM drive and some 9GB cartridges.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how much help this will be but I also had problems with the amazing vanishing CD drive when installing Windows alongside Linux. I used partition magic to set up my original Windows and Linux partitions before I did anything else with my computer. The Linux partitions have always been left untouched by my Windows installs and upgrades but I have had to reinstall boot magic each time (the same would probably be true of LILO it that is what you are using). I found the way to avoid the CD drive problem was to boot the computer from my previous Win95/98/98SE boot floppy, pick the CD drive option and then run setup from the CD drive. You can run setup several times and it seems to pick up from where it left off if there is a problem. Does this help in any way?