After checking the Windows 8 compatibility center and running the upgrade assistant (with a compatible result), I upgraded to Windows 8 from Windows 7. Immediately after upgrading, I realized that my DVD drives were no longer appearing. I tried many different
suggestions that have worked in past Windows versions after making sure that they were still detected by my BIOS.
As I was digging through the system, an alert in the Device Manager caught my attention. I think I now know why Windows isn't seeing them.
I've got an Asus motherboard - model M3A. The documentation of the board says it comes with an AMD 770 Chipset. When I go through the device manager, I'm not sure this is the case as all of the controllers are "SB600" - the SATA Controller, the SMBus,
etc. are all SB600 and they have all installed fine. The one element that did not is the SB600 ATA Controller, and since both of my internal DVD drives are ATA - I'm thinking this is the problem.
Does anyone know if a driver update has been issued for the SB600 ATA Controller? I still have the previous drivers that worked under Windows 7 (atihdc.inf - is the inf file) and when I try to use them, I get the following message:
"Windows found driver software for your device but encountered a problem while attempting to install it.
ATI IDE Controller
An error occurred during the installation of the device: The driver installation file for this device is missing a necessary entry. This may be because the INF was written for Windows 95 or later. Contact your hardware vendor."
Which isn't much help. Neither is the Asus site (they don't even list Windows 8 as an option for drivers on their site) nor is the AMD page - I've downloaded the Chipset drivers for Windows 8 for the 700 series, and while it includes the SMBus, SATA,
and USB drivers, it does not include the IDE/ATA drivers.
Any ideas or suggestions, or am I going to just have to ignore the ATA interface on this board and upgrade everything to SATA in order to have DVD support in this tower?
Thanks,
Jackson