Mountain Man

"Disk"drivers are part of windows regardless of installing the motherboard
drivers or not.
That includes drivers for USB.
All the years I have been installing XP or any other version of windows ALL
hard drives are seen and can be used before the "chipset"drivers were
installed.
Vista is no different.
I installed Vista and external hard drives work ok.
There are built in drivers for hard drives in Vista and there are no
motherboard drivers anywhere yet.

"Mark Rae" <mark@markNOSPAMrae.com> wrote in message
news:u%23S9vOAFHHA.4080@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
>
> OK - here's possibly an interesting one...
>
> I have recently purchased a new PC which has two SATA hard drives - no IDE
> drives at all.
>
> Have installed my MSDN copy of Vista Business on it - for development and
> testing purposes, naturally... :-)
>
> I also have a USB IDE hard disk harness which allows me to treat a
> stand-alone IDE hard drive as a USB device.
>
> When I plug the USB hard disk into one of the new PC's USB ports, it
> recognises it as a removable device but, because the machine has no IDE
> hard disk drivers on it, doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't create a
> drive letter for it etc... Windows Explorer (you know what I mean) seems
> to hang for an age while it tries to work out what to do with the new
> device, then displays nothing.
>
> Installing Vista onto a machine with IDE hard disks doesn't display this
> behaviour because it already knows all about IDE hard drives and what to
> do with them.
>
> What's the easiest way round this? Is it simply a matter of copying some
> files from the Vista image into the PC's %SYSTEM32% folder, or is there
> more to it than that...?
>
> Any assistance gratefully received.
>
> Mark
>
>