Error for IDE controller showing in Event Viewer

alanbjames · 19-09-2014, 00:35

I have been looking through my event viewer and have noticed every now and then an error appears in windows logs under system logs and states...

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort1

Touch wood my computer is working fine, no lockups or slow downs i can think of that could be a start of a dicky hard drive.

Anyone have any idea what it could mean?

qasdfdsaq · 19-09-2014, 01:11

Controller errors don't usually have anything to do with a hard drive. Plus, IDE hard drives died out nearly a decade ago so you'd have to have a very old computer for that to apply. More likely a CD-ROM drive or a SATA controller with incorrect settings and drivers.

I would try to identify what is on IdePort1 from Device Manager, only then will we be able to figure out if it's worth worrying about or not.

alanbjames · 19-09-2014, 01:39

How would i go about doing that?

When i look at the properties of drives or the sata ports the information is hazy at best.

I really hope touch wood its just a driver that i dont have to worry about as i stated im getting no crashes or hangs touch wood. I also run a brilliant program called hard disk sentinal and it gives u all the details about the drives in your PC from errors to temperature and even how many days the drive has been active etc.

Hard Disk sentinal isnt picking up any errors on any of the drives in the PC.

madmax215 · 19-09-2014, 08:54

The ide driver is a chip on your motherboard you will not be able to repair or check it. First open your computer up and look at your HDD if it has a small red or orange cable then it will be a SATA drive, so you will not a problem there. Then look at your CDrom drives and see if you have the same cable or not. If you have a long gray ribbon cable then that is a IDE cable, trace it back to the motherboard to see were it goes. You may need a light to see but there will be small letters on your motherboard saying IDE1, IDE2, SATA1-4, FDD1, just find the IDE1 port and then make a decision if you need it or not. You may be lucky and it may be a faulty windows driver.

alanbjames · 19-09-2014, 11:34

all my drives are sata drives.

madmax215 · 19-09-2014, 12:23

If all your drives are SATA and your not using IDE at all, then you are worring for nothing, SATA does not need IDE to work, different chip.

qasdfdsaq · 20-09-2014, 02:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by alanbjames

How would i go about doing that? When i look at the properties of drives or the sata ports the information is hazy at best. I really hope touch wood its just a driver that i dont have to worry about as i stated im getting no crashes or hangs touch wood. I also run a brilliant program called hard disk sentinal and it gives u all the details about the drives in your PC from errors to temperature and even how many days the drive has been active etc. Hard Disk sentinal isnt picking up any errors on any of the drives in the PC.

Go into Device Manager and look under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. If you see any 'ATA Channel' entries open them and look under Advanced to see what's connected.

You can also look under Disk Drives in Device Manager, double click on the entry for your hard drive, and look under Details => Hardware IDs or Physical Device Opject Name.

alanbjames · 20-09-2014, 22:20

It was the drive after all, i looked in the logs of Hard Disk Sentinal and it stated there were 1742 instances that the drive lost contact with the sata port basically and data had been corrupted on 72 occasions while transferring.

It was a Seagate Barracuda 1TB Sata III 64mb Cache

Ive now fitted a 2TB WD Black Performance Sata III 64MB Cache and changed the Sata lead incase and touch wood no more instances of IDE errors in the event viewer.

ntl customer · 24-09-2014, 22:24

Definitely a dodgy hard drive.

I had loads of similar errors of "The device, \Device\Scsi\mv91xx1, did not respond within the timeout period", even though I don't have any SCSI devices...

It was a hard drive failing, as a few weeks later I experienced my system hanging, and the logs filling up with good ol' "The device, \Device\Harddisk4\D, is not ready for access yet." and "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur."

The HD had a good innings though, looked at the hours powered up and it was around 9.5 years (!), which is close to the amount of time I've had the drive, bought in 2004, a cutting edge 250GB capacity model.

I've only seen the controller error described in the OP on optical drives when I've put in a rubbish CD that's scratched.