Weird problem with eMachines DVD-RW drive solved

I've been stumped by this problem with my eMachines M6809 laptop for a couple of years, ever since I first bought the beast. The problem was with the Slimtype SDW-431s DVD-RW drive when run under Windows XP. It would read the contents of the CD/DVD OK, but when I tried to launch a program from it, I'd get an error similar to this:

The procedure entry point blahblahblah could not be located in the dynamic link library blah blah blah.

Notice the weird casing in the procedure name MsgWaitForMultIpleObjects. It should have been MsgWaitForMultipleObjects.

For a long time, I couldn't figure out what the heck that error was about, and had dismissed it as a defective DVD drive and left it at that...At least until this weekend.

Last Friday, at approximately 9:30AM Eastern Standard Time, the hard drive on my lovely eMachine decided to pull a head-crash stunt, sending 5 years worth of my life into /dev/null (a long and painful story for another day), and once again I was motivated to get this damned DVD drive working so that I can do backups with.

This time, I stumbled onto this discussion thread on cdfreaks.com, and figured out what the cause was: it had to do with the Secondary IDE Channel setting used by the DVD device driver on XP. This setting is accessible through the Control Panel Device Manager. By default, the Transfer Mode for Device 0 on this channel property was set to "use DMA if available". I changed it to "use PIO only", and voilà! Everything started working like a charm. Now it can read and run programs off the DVD with no problem.


Prior to finding the solution, I had tried googling like nobody's business, hoping to find some other people who might have experienced similar symptoms, to no avail. So now I thought I'd post my findings here, in hope that it could help some other poor souls out there who might have the misfortune of owning an eMachines laptop and have managed to bump into the same problem.

Visual Studio 6 and AMD64?

So after five years, I finally took the chance to upgrade to a (much) more powerful computer. And to add insult to injuries, it's a 64-bit machine (an AMD64 eMachine to be exact), running Windows XP. An aside note of caution: if you're considering putting on Service Pack 2 (SP2) and have no real need for doing it other than wanting to get the latest and greatest, my advice: don't! I found that a couple of my applications just won't run after it. I had to take out SP2, put SP1 back on, and then things ran fine.

Right now, I'm trying to install Visual Studio 6 on the new machine and having a hell of a time. The installer refuses to run, giving weird error messages about missing kernel32.dll entry points. I checked and the entry point is there in the DLL. I have a hunch it might have something to do with the 64-bit thing. I googled everywhere and so far haven't found a solution yet. Perhaps this is a sign to migrate to .NET? ;-)