Skywatcher

Well, RLoew's SATA patch costs US$11 (which is about £6.50), and arrives by e-mail right after you pay. All the wait and effort involved saved you about £1.50. Is it worth it? Not much in it, really. I guess at least with the adaptor I am less likely to lose it.

So just as an update in case anyone else has this problem: I fixed it by buying a SATA to IDE adaptor (about £5 on eBay I think). I reinstalled Windows with the adaptor installed (guess I didn't need to but I wanted to start afresh ) and everything ran/is running smoothly. Now just the small problem of LAN and audio drivers... Anyone know if there are any audio drivers for a SoundMax integrated card? I can't even remember what LAN card it is right now.

If this is a on fresh ME install with nothing updated I suggest you install the (unofficial) Windows ME service pack and IE6SP1 and see how it fares after that. Sorry, should have mentioned: they're both installed already. It's puzzling me as I've not had this problem previously when I have used ME.

Sorry if this has already been asked and answered here (if so I have missed it), but on a ME install RP9 is causing an "Explorer caused an error in <unknown>" error on boot and when I attempt to open Explorer windows. Anyone know why this is happening and how I can fix it?

It's an ASUS A8N-VM with 1GB of RAM (at least, for now). Thanks - this has indeed worked, albeit as a temporary solution! I can now boot normally and start installing drivers.

Ah, thanks for the link - missed that one! It seems I managed to get ACPI disabled. It is a SATA hard drive. I can't remember if this is from that same thread or another I ended up reading, but the hanging on normal boot is being caused by esdi_506.pdr. I downloaded the patched version and replaced it but it still hangs. I am guessing that I am going to need the patched sata.inf from Rloew - is that correct? Do I have any alternatives?

Hi all, So I am trying to install ME on a 2004 (I think) desktop and everything goes swimmingly until the last stage of setup, where the system would normally reboot and configure the start menu, control panel, etc. Here it just freezes ("Completed updating files, continuing to load Windows... *blink blink blink*") I have discovered through trial and error that I am able to start into safe mode successfully. When I do this, if I remove ACPI BIOS from the device manager, the system will boot up normally and get to the desktop. However, when I do this, it does not detect ANY of my peripherals (USB, CD drive, graphics card, etc.) and does not even display anything as an unknown device. (I also tried manually installing Plug and Play failsafe BIOS with the same result.) I don't pretend to know much about ACPI but from my research here and elsewhere I see a lot of people recommending disabling it. I don't really care either way as long as I get a working system where I can use my hardware devices. (So far I have tried disabling it in the registry, BIOS and by using the "/p I" setup switch but none give a clean boot.) So my question is, I guess, if anyone can shed any light on this, or suggest what I can try in order to get the system working normally? Any help would be greatly appreciated.