No luck in hardware so will try here

A couple of days ago I took a SATA hard drive from another computer and
installed it on this computer. I hot plugged it in and everything went
well. Assigned G & L and showed up in Computer and was viewable in
explorer normally.
I decided I wanted to keep my hard drives sequentially lettered, so I
changed L to the next available letter, took H-K and moved them down 1
letter and changed the temp letter to H (all in Disk Management). Still
everything showed up okay in Computer, Disk Management and Device Manager.
Now for the problem.
Next reboot the computer said it had to install new drivers. I let each of
the two iterations find the appropriate driver, after which it had to
reboot. After the reboot the drive failed to show up in Computer or Disk
Management, it showed up as other devices in Device Manager. The next
reboot asked for drivers again, but this time both iterations failed to find
drivers. The solution offered was to download KB940199 which I did and it
would not install. I checked to see installed updates and see I installed
it on 1/1/2008. Next reboot asked for the drivers
again and this time I
clicked not to offer the New Hardware Wizard again for this device for both
iterations (still just one drive). Next reboot failed on hardware failure
0x0000007b. I booted with last known good, successfully, but now asks for
drivers again.
Short story, now I either have to select ask again and go thru this each
time the machine boots since every time I select Don't Ask the hardware
crash occurs.
It makes no difference whether the drive is connected or not. With it
connected I get the drive shown in Other Devices with the driver not
installed. If I change to another SATA HD, It still lists the original hard
drive number, not the new one.

System Restore ceased working and will post that problem separately.

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:05:35 -0700, "John Barnes" <(E-Mail Removed)>
wrote:

>Next reboot the computer said it had to install new drivers. I let each of
>the two iterations find the appropriate driver, after which it had to
>reboot. After the reboot the drive failed to show up in Computer or Disk
>Management, it showed up as other devices in Device Manager. The next
>reboot asked for drivers again, but this time both iterations failed to find
>drivers.

I had a similar issue when first installing Vista a year ago. Vista
would have one of it's infamous hissy fits and keep adding "new"
devices it claimed to have found ending up with it claiming I had
about a dozen and a half IDE channels which of course is nuts. As soon
as I tried to remove these bogus channels through Device Manager Vista
would put them right back next time I booted. Just as soon as I
rebooted Vista would pop up the new hardware found window then shortly
after say the driver failed or some wasn't found garbage. There was
nothing wrong with the hardware and my drives don't add or want
separate drivers other than what Vista installs automatically. All
Vista stupidity as usual.

Judging by the drive letters you mentioned you have lots of drives,
some external like I do.

How did I resolve it?

Slowly. I yanked ALL my hard drives,(actually just unplugged their
power and data cables) except for my root drive which contains the
partition Vista is in. Then I rebooted. As expected Vista was happy,
it correctly saw ONE physical drive with two partitions, C, for Vista
and E for some data files. D is for my DVD writer if anyone cares.

I next added back all my drives one at a time and rebooted after
adding each. Vista remained happy and saw the drives correctly as I
added them and not once did it pop up any "new driver found" window.

I finally got back to my normal C, E, F, G, H configuration and now
Vista doesn't nag when I add/remove externals W, Z, Y and Z.

Maybe the slow and steady approach will work for you. Good luck.

Interesting sidebar.

I have a motherboard that has 8 SATA channels and one IDE channel. All
but my root drive are SATA drives. HOW I used the SATA channels, which
channel and which controller they were plugged into, there's two on
this MB, had a profound effect on if or not the system would boot.
Some if used ahead of others would end up with the BIOS saying it
couldn't find any operating system suggesting the root drive (C) which
is on the IDE channel was sometimes bypassed with BIOS looking on one
of the SATA channels to boot from and since no OS is there saying it
couldn't find a OS. Of course the BIOS is set to boot from the IDE
channel, but for some odd reason it didn't always look there
apparently. Computers can drive you nuts sometimes. ;-)