Here is the problem. I have an old but super solid and stable PC that runs XP Home SP3 on i850 with P4 2.6 GHz and PATA HD. My wife uses it a lot for her studies (MS Office, internet, and email) and prefers it over her newer laptop due to the large monitor in the old PC. Recently, I installed UPS and configured hibernation for power outage, but noticed very slow hibernation, almost 2 minutes, too long to safely shut the PC on UPS in case of a power failure.

After tinkering with this I realized the problem was with the Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 (most recent version) and the hibernation went to only 20 secs after uninstalling IAA.

However, that removed DVD-RW from my system and it is not visible in device manager anymore with no errors reported. The whole secondary IDE channel is missing.  I tried the NO CD fix that removes the lowfilter and highfilter registries and it didn't help. I also did the Microsoft FixIt and it failed to fix it.  I found someone with the same problem that was only fixed by reinstalling IAA. Well, I reinstalled it, and DVD works, but the hibernation time is very slow again. And yes, IAA works some and shortens boot time by like 5 secs.

Second time I uninstalled IAA in safe mode and the same story, fast hibernation, but DVD and secondary IDE channel missing again.

There are no other problems with the PC, all drivers (including chipset) are up to date and I religiously back up with Ghost 2003, but never had a catastrophic failure since I put the system together in 2004. The HD has write cashe enabled and runs UDMA mode 5 as it should.

Any ideas how to revive the missing CD/DVD without reinstalling IAA?

I'm stumped. I posted about it on Intel forum, but it sucks. Then I remember this forum with all the resident geeks.

Many thanks!

PS: I hope Rad is OK. I was in jail once too. It lasted several hrs before my lawyer got me out. Long story.

I think there is an easier approach.  Reinstall IAA.  2 minutes is plenty fast.  Most UPS's advertise being able to keep your computer running closer to 20 minutes after the power fails.

If you'd like to extend the time your computer has to shut down, don't plug the monitor into the battery-backed outlets.  The computer itself doesn't really use much power and any UPS should easily keep it running for the 2 minutes you need for hibernation.  Your big monitor is using way more power than your computer is, so plug it into a non-battery backed outlet.  Your monitor will loose power during an outage, but that shouldn't damage it and your computer will have plenty of time to hibernate.

Another option is asking your computer to shut down on power failure instead of hibernating.  Shutting down might be quicker than hibernating since your computer won't have to save the state of all your memory to your (slow/old) HDD.  You might loose any unsaved work, but at least you'll get a clean shutdown and avoid any disk corruption.

Yet another option is to have your wife use the laptop (hear me out for a second.)  If the only thing she misses about her (old/slow) desktop when using the laptop is the big monitor, it is likely you could hook the monitor to the laptop when it's at home and she'll have the best of both worlds.  The laptop has an internal battery, and can run for plenty of time on its own if the power fails.

@ friendly_jacek

Of course--what MrMagoo said makes a lot of sense.

Personally, I don't use *hibernation*.  I program the UPS software to shut down after two minutes--no matter what!  The program pops up a warning when the power goes down saying I have two minutes to close out any running programs.  If I don't respond--it closes everything for me after 2 minutes, and *yes* I would loose anything that wasn't saved appropriately before the power loss. 


Quote:

However, that removed DVD-RW from my system and it is not visible in device manager anymore with no errors reported. The whole secondary IDE channel is missing.

Is anything else hooked up to the Secondary IDE Channel? 

Are you using *Cable Select* or are you jumpering the optical drive manually to *Master* or *Slave*?  What is the jumper setting if doing it manually?

Are you using *Cable Select* on the Primary IDE Channel?

Are you using both of the connectors on the Primary IDE Channel?

Thank you both for replies.

I fixed it. I went back to a previous good image of the system partition (one of few instances when Ghost came in handy as the XP system restore failed for some reasons) and uninstalled IAA again. This time the second IDE channel is working as a charm on original XP drivers and the IDE speed went up according HDtach.

I think what could have happened was that all 4 IDE devices were used back then when IAA was installed (long time ago) while 3 were used when I uninstalled IAA as I have now a removable HD (for backups only) on secondary IDE as a master and it was not in use at that time.

The second uninstall was with the removable HD in place and I guess that was needed for proper install of secondary channel by XP.

@ friendly_jacek

Thanks for the feedback. 

Glad to hear you resolved the issue--but, the problem was/is kinda weird!