Post-SP3 Blues - External Drives Stopped Working

[Michael Faklis]

I installed SP3 on my 32-bit Windows Professional laptop, but its had some
undesirable side effects I need some help correcting:

1) The Address toolbar is gone. It's even missing from the list of
available toolbars. I find this a very useful tool. How can I recover this
tool?

2) My external disks are having trouble starting up, which results in
Windows not starting up. The two firewire disks were daisy-chained. I now
need to remove them to start windows, and even then when reconnected one at
a time, only the first one of them will start-up. When connecting the
second one (daisy chained or in a second firewire port) both firewire drives
stopped working. Windows itself stays up. With USB2 drives, Windows
starts up, but often only one drive is recognized. From time to time, both
USB2 drives are recognized.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to correct these problems?

- Michael Faklis <[email protected]>

 

[neil]

As I understand it the Address Toolbar has been removed. The rest I can't
comment on.
Neil

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

1) The Address Toolbar is removed from XP SP3 due to legal concerns MS had
relating to the close integration of IE in Windows.

 

[Sandy J]

Sorry to butt in Michael but what address bar do you mean? The one in
internet explorer, outlook express, or the one in Windows explorer? It's
just that I'd like to know what to expect.

Sandy

I installed SP3 on my 32-bit Windows Professional laptop, but its had some
undesirable side effects I need some help correcting:

1) The Address toolbar is gone. It's even missing from the list of
available toolbars. I find this a very useful tool. How can I recover this
tool?

2) My external disks are having trouble starting up, which results in
Windows not starting up. The two firewire disks were daisy-chained. I now
need to remove them to start windows, and even then when reconnected one at
a time, only the first one of them will start-up. When connecting the
second one (daisy chained or in a second firewire port) both firewire drives
stopped working. Windows itself stays up. With USB2 drives, Windows
starts up, but often only one drive is recognized. From time to time, both
USB2 drives are recognized.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to correct these problems?

- Michael Faklis <[email protected]>

 

[smlunatick]

As I understand it the Address Toolbar has been removed. The rest I can't
comment on.









- Show quoted text -

There is several "tweaks" to replace the Address toolbar that you
should be able to find.

 

[Michael Faklis]

I'm referring to the optional address toobar in the Windows task bar.

- Michael Faklis
\

 

[Sandy J]

HI Michael, thanks, I googled for it and I never even knew that option
existed... :-O. BTW, I saw somwhere in one of the threads how to hot fix
that missing address bar, but you had to save a dll from the system before
you installed service pack 3. Look for this thread: Re: XP SP3
Problems/Help posted byh VanguardLH, there were 2 important replies
concerning that issue.
Sandy


I'm referring to the optional address toobar in the Windows task bar.

- Michael Faklis
\

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf]

2) My external disks are having trouble starting up, which results in

Windows not starting up. The two firewire disks were daisy-chained. I now
need to remove them to start windows, and even then when reconnected one at
a time, only the first one of them will start-up. When connecting the
second one (daisy chained or in a second firewire port) both firewire drives
stopped working. Windows itself stays up. With USB2 drives, Windows
starts up, but often only one drive is recognized. From time to time, both
USB2 drives are recognized.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to correct these problems?

Try this:

Go to device manager and remove the external drives, reboot and let XP
re-detect. I suspect the driver is still stuck from the OLD SP2
version and maybe SP3 will be smart enough to use the updated SP3
version. Is this an integrated firewire card or 3rd party?

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

A1. Default behavior. Read the Release Notes and White Paper.

A2. Free unlimited installation and compatibility support is available for
Windows XP, but only for Service Pack 3 (SP3), until 14 Apr-09. Chat and
e-mail support is available only in the United States and Canada.

• US:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-us&prid=11273&gprid=522131

• CA:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-ca&prid=11273&gprid=522131

• UK:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-uk&prid=11273&gprid=522131

• AU:
http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?ln=en-au&prid=11273&gprid=522131

• Other: http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?gprid=1173 | select
Windows XP | select Windows XP Service Pack 3

 

[Michael Faklis]

I have to get it started with those devices to delete tem via the Device
Manager. Can I delete them via the registry?

I'm using the built-in USB1 ports for the mouse and ifrared device. I'm
using a combo USB2/Firewire 400 PCCard for the disk drives.

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf]

I have to get it started with those devices to delete tem via the Device

Manager. Can I delete them via the registry?

I'm using the built-in USB1 ports for the mouse and ifrared device. I'm
using a combo USB2/Firewire 400 PCCard for the disk drives.

There's one trick you can do that doesn't require digging through the
registry and it's a very simple XP hack. Boot to XP in either Safe
Mode or as you would normally and go to Control Panel > System >
Advanced > Environment Variables. In the System Variables section,
click New and enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices as the variable
name and 1 as the variable value. At this point you *can* reboot but
most of the time the variable takes as soon as you click OK.

Now, go over to your device manager and from the View menu, choose
Show Hidden Devices. This lets you get at everything. When you expand
the device groups (by clicking the [+]) you may sometimes notice that
some items are a solid icon and others are soft of there but a bit
greyed out, the ones that are greyed out can be safely removed. I
would not recommend messing with anything in the Non-Pug and Play
area.

At this point, you can go through the Disk Drives and Storage Volumes
and see what's there. If you know what model you main HD is, blow out
whatever is there. If you remove your HD, no big deal as XP will
re-detect upon reboot. Dig through the Universal Serial Bus
controllers section for any "Unknown Device" bangs or some such junk
entry. I would also recommend going through and seeing if you have any
other "Unknown Device" bangs or entries and just blowing them out.

How about driver for that combo USB/Firewire card? Anything newer from
the manufacturer?

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[Michael Faklis]

Thank you so much. Where did you learn about that environment variable?

- Michael Faklis

I have to get it started with those devices to delete tem via the Device
Manager. Can I delete them via the registry?

I'm using the built-in USB1 ports for the mouse and ifrared device. I'm
using a combo USB2/Firewire 400 PCCard for the disk drives.

There's one trick you can do that doesn't require digging through the
registry and it's a very simple XP hack. Boot to XP in either Safe
Mode or as you would normally and go to Control Panel > System >
Advanced > Environment Variables. In the System Variables section,
click New and enter devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices as the variable
name and 1 as the variable value. At this point you *can* reboot but
most of the time the variable takes as soon as you click OK.

Now, go over to your device manager and from the View menu, choose
Show Hidden Devices. This lets you get at everything. When you expand
the device groups (by clicking the [+]) you may sometimes notice that
some items are a solid icon and others are soft of there but a bit
greyed out, the ones that are greyed out can be safely removed. I
would not recommend messing with anything in the Non-Pug and Play
area.

At this point, you can go through the Disk Drives and Storage Volumes
and see what's there. If you know what model you main HD is, blow out
whatever is there. If you remove your HD, no big deal as XP will
re-detect upon reboot. Dig through the Universal Serial Bus
controllers section for any "Unknown Device" bangs or some such junk
entry. I would also recommend going through and seeing if you have any
other "Unknown Device" bangs or entries and just blowing them out.

How about driver for that combo USB/Firewire card? Anything newer from
the manufacturer?

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf]

Thank you so much. Where did you learn about that environment variable?

One of those hacks you pick up along the way. I think I got it from
Kim Komando actually a loooooooong time ago. Did it help out any?

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[Michael Faklis]

Well, it was a nice exercise, but it didn't fix the problem.

I did a safe boot to delete all of the unused devices. I was pretty excited
when I rebooted, because my laptop came up after just a minute, rather than
the 10 minutes it usually takes to startup. It turns out that XP
immediately reloaded all of the unused devices, even those that hadn't been
attached for years. The next reboot took 10 minutes again. I attached my
external devices one by one. The first firewire drive attached correctly,
but the second failed to attach as daisy-chains to the first, or when
attached to its own firewire port. So there was no real change.

It was interesting to see of those unused devices. My laptop has gone
through 3 motherboards, a processor upgrade (with one of the motherboards),
three LCD panels, 4 primary disk drives, and various other changes, and all
of those obsolete devices were still registered. As I mentioned above, they
all reregistered upon reboot. There has to be some branch in the registry
that needs to be cleared up to prevent those old devices from reregistering.

- Michael Faklis

 

[R. McCarty]

Add a System Environment Variable:
DevMgr_Show_NonPresent_Devices
and set it's value = 1
Open Device Manager, Click View - tic/Check "Show Hidden Devices"
Now DM will show even Plug-&-Play Phantom entries. You can safely
remove the items shown in diminished tone or grayed out from all the
Device Manager categories except "Sound" which normally has a few
entries which are grayed out, but not true phantoms.

 

[Revtim]

I have pretty much the same problem, I opened a thread here:
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3322435&SiteID=17&mode=1

No solution yet, although a helpful Microsoft employee is looking into it.
You may want to monitor that thread.

 

[Revtim]

Forgot to ask: is it a Western Digital external drive? Mine is WD, and so is
another person in the other thread having this issue.

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf]

Well, it was a nice exercise, but it didn't fix the problem.

I did a safe boot to delete all of the unused devices. I was pretty excited
when I rebooted, because my laptop came up after just a minute, rather than
the 10 minutes it usually takes to startup. It turns out that XP
immediately reloaded all of the unused devices, even those that hadn't been
attached for years. The next reboot took 10 minutes again. I attached my
external devices one by one. The first firewire drive attached correctly,
but the second failed to attach as daisy-chains to the first, or when
attached to its own firewire port. So there was no real change.

It was interesting to see of those unused devices. My laptop has gone
through 3 motherboards, a processor upgrade (with one of the motherboards),
three LCD panels, 4 primary disk drives, and various other changes, and all
of those obsolete devices were still registered. As I mentioned above, they
all reregistered upon reboot. There has to be some branch in the registry
that needs to be cleared up to prevent those old devices from reregistering.

Sorry it didn't work out. Dumb question: Is the system BIOS up to
date? I was also wondering possibly there was kind of butting of heads
with drives wanting to be the same drive letter and thus the other
drive is not showing up. I've seen this when I've plugged in external
USB drives and flash drives at the same time. If I go to the Disk
Management tool, all the drives will be there but for whatever bizarre
reason, one drive that already has a reserved drive letter, is also
being occupied by another device and it also has the same drive letter
but cannot be seen. When I do "Change drive letters and paths" and
assign it a different drive letter, it shows up.

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[Thee Chicago Wolf]

Well, it was a nice exercise, but it didn't fix the problem.

I did a safe boot to delete all of the unused devices. I was pretty excited
when I rebooted, because my laptop came up after just a minute, rather than
the 10 minutes it usually takes to startup. It turns out that XP
immediately reloaded all of the unused devices, even those that hadn't been
attached for years. The next reboot took 10 minutes again. I attached my
external devices one by one. The first firewire drive attached correctly,
but the second failed to attach as daisy-chains to the first, or when
attached to its own firewire port. So there was no real change.

It was interesting to see of those unused devices. My laptop has gone
through 3 motherboards, a processor upgrade (with one of the motherboards),
three LCD panels, 4 primary disk drives, and various other changes, and all
of those obsolete devices were still registered. As I mentioned above, they
all reregistered upon reboot. There has to be some branch in the registry
that needs to be cleared up to prevent those old devices from reregistering.

See if you can try what it says in this KB article just for the heck
of it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894956

- Thee Chicago Wolf

 

[Michael Faklis]

I've been careful about the assigned drive letters, however the drives may
been first assigned a drive letter when firewire worked, and since then had
the same drive letter assigned when connected vi USB2.

- Michael Faklis
\