My computer is experiencing some problems when I try to add a SATA hard disk drive. The motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9) has the usual two IDE connectors, both of which have the primary and secondary channels occupied with two hard disks, an optical drive, and a Zip drive. The motherboard also has eight SATA connectors, four of which are used by the on-board nVidia chipset. On the assumption that sooner or later one of the IDE channels will fail, I tried to connect a SATA hard drive, as a reserve, to one of the appropriate SATA connectors on the board. The BIOS correctly identified the new drive, but the system would not proceed to boot, displaying the following error message: “Windows could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot configuration problem: Did not properly generate ARC name for HAL and system paths. Please check the Windows documentation about ARC configuration options and your hardware reference manuals for additional information”. I cannot find either of these terms in the Windows Help files or in the manual that came with the system board. The system BIOS has never been updated, nor has the chipset. The computer is running Windows XP SP2. Can you help in getting the system to recognise the SATA hard drive? (more…)

For some time now a blue screen of death appears on a random basis with the following message: “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. STOP CODE: 0×100000d1 (0×0000006a, 0×00000005, 0×00000000, 0xf867e875 atapi.sys address F867E875 base at F86790000, DATESTAMP 41107b4d”. How can I stop these errors from occurring? The computer is running Windows XP SP2. (more…)

I have a few questions regarding reliability of USB flash drivers. Firstly, can the drive be damaged by removing the drive from the computer without first stopping the device? Whenever I remove the drive I always use the Safely Remove Hardware feature to ‘Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device - Drive (E:)’. Once the drive has been stopped, a message appears informing ‘The ‘USB Mass Storage Device’ device can now be safely removed from the system’. The wording of the message implies that removing the drive at any other time is not safe. Sometimes I shut down Windows (or have Windows hibernating) forgetting my flash drive is still connected. Could this damage the drive? Secondly, how durable and reliable are these flash drives? They are still more expensive than hard-disk drives, but I feel inclined to think since they have no moving parts they should be less prone to failure. Is this assumption correct, and would you recommend flash drives for backups? (more…)

My USB 2.0 256 MB flash drive (a no-name generic flash drive) has been working great in the past, through directly plugging the drive into a USB port on the computer. However, I recently purchased a non-powered 4-port USB 2.0 hub. When the hub was connected to the computer, Windows seemed to correctly identify and install the hub. I then plugged my USB flash drive into the hub and a message appeared on screen saying ‘Unknown Device’. So I then attached a USB printer to the hub and sent a print job, which printed half of the document and then stopped! However, the printer prints correctly when I connect the printer directly to a USB port on the computer. However, if I try to connect the flash drive directly to a USB port (I have tried all the available ports) it is no longer recognised correctly, and now displays the same ‘Unknown Device’ message. The same result occurs when connecting another generic brand flash drive directly to the USB port on the computer. Uninstalling and letting the system reinstall all the USB devices in the Device Manager does not fix the problem. The flash drive works fine on my work computer and daughter’s laptop, so it doesn’t appear to be faulty. Interestingly, my daughter has an IBM USB 2.0 flash drive which works fine on the computer, and all other USB devices (e.g. the USB printer) work fine. So, it seems the computer just won’t recognise any generic USB 2.0 flash drives. The computer is a Pentium 4 with Windows XP Home Edition SP 2. (more…)

For the past six months I have been using a 128MB Sony Microvault USB thumb drive on my laptop running Windows XP. The computer has no contact with the internet, and does not have much additional software installed. Recently, the USB drive has ceased to function, instead producing the error message: ‘The software you are installing for this hardware disk drive has not passed Windows Logo testing to verify its compatibility with Windows XP’. The Sony site offers drivers for other operating systems, but not Windows XP. The drive still works perfectly with my Linux computer. (more…)