Daemon 4.09 & SPTD 1.4.3 disable Primary IDE

[Guest]

Hi everyone,
Is it possible for an installation of Daemon Tools and SPTD to make any device connected to the Primary IDE connection dissappear in Windows and in the BIOS?
I've been running Windows XP 64 on a Tyan s2877 Motherboard with a Pioneer 110 DVD Drive on the Primary IDE and a PATA Hard Drive on the Secondary IDE. Everything has been stable for months.
I updated Daemon Tools to 4.09 64 bit and SPTD to 1.4.3 and started experiencing freezes on the Windows boot logo screen and lost my Pioneer DVD Drive in the BIOS and in Windows. Not knowing what the cause was I replaced the entire Windows XP partition with a mirror image I had created a few months back using SystemRescueCD and Unix tools (to be clear, that's not a backup restore, it's the entire partition as it was previously, byte for byte).
Hence I was back to the stable Daemon Tools 4.03 and STPD, Windows stopped freezing on boot up but my Pioneer DVD Drive was still missing. I tested the Pioneer drive in a Mac and it was fine, I tested another DVD Drive in the PC and it didn't show up: therefore the problem lay with the Primary IDE. I put the Pioneer DVD Drive on the Secondary IDE and it magically reappeared, I put the Hard Disk that had been on the Secondary IDE on the Primary IDE and it didn't show up. Conclusion again, my Primary IDE is somehow corrupted.
I find it hard to believe that my Primary IDE went down *co-incidentally* at the same time as I installed Daemon and SPTD and that they're not connected. It feels like (probably) SPTD has somehow affected the Primary IDE at a BIOS level and nothing will now show up on it.
Any suggestions? Is this possible or can someone tell me it's not possible and I should RMA the motherboard as faulty.
Thanks for any help.

[Blazkowicz]

Install SPTD 1.47 (duplexsecure.com).

[edwinbradford]

OK, an update for anyone else experiencing this problem. Our IT department at work suggested I RMA the motherboard when I explained the symptoms to them but I just fixed it tonight, it was a software related issue and not hardware, Daemon and SPTD were the cause. I have to say, I installed Daemon and SPTD a year or so back and it brought Windows to it's knees then before I recovered it.

OK so the fix: flash your BIOS, reset your CMOS as per Motherboard manufacturer instructions and reinstall your OS in that order. I reinstalled Windows first but because the problem was at a root level it somehow re-corrupted it immediately I rebooted. All my operating systems: Unix, OSX and Windows failed.

Reflashing the BIOS and resetting the CMOS alone did not fix it either because although that remedied the fault, Windows had already been recorrupted from having been booted before the BIOS reflash. The second reinstall of Windows fixed the issue as I now had a clean BIOS, reset CMOS and clean Windows. Phew.

I'm just relieved to have my machine back up and running, If I consider updating Daemon ever in the future I'll do a mirror image backup immediately before hand, for now I'm going to run the old stable versions, I can only guess but it feels like this is an SPTD issue rather than Daemon.

Hope that helps other people.