FAQ for 64-bit Windows Hardware

  • Article

Answers to frequently-asked general, device driver, and processor-related questions are detailed below.

Topics on this page:

  • General
  • Device Drivers
  • Processors

 

General

 

  • Why am I having problems installing the Operating System if I'm using the latest SCSI or IDE controller technology?
    If you get the error message— Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system. If you are upgrading by using the Winnt32.exe file, or if you are performing a new installation by using the Winnt.exe file, you receive the following Stop error:
    Stop 0x0000007B Inaccessible_boot_device     —when installing Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Microsoft Windows Server 2003 on a new computer or on a computer that has the latest SCSI or IDE controller technology, you may have to use an OEM device driver to support, for example, a new mass storage controller, to continue with the installation. The symptoms that you may have installing an OEM device driver include the following:
    • The computer may keep restarting and never start the GUI installation after the text mode Setup is finished.
    • The Setup program may stop, and you may receive an error message if the Setup program does not correctly detect the controller.
    • If you are booting from the installation floppy disks or CD-ROM disc.
  • Why can’t read data on a multi-session recordable DVD?
    After the 100th recorded session to a multi-session recordable DVD no data can be read except what was recorded during the first session. For more information, please see Knowledge Base article 888622 and the Hardware Design Guide for Windows Server.

Device Drivers

General

  • Where can I learn more about hardware and drivers for the 64-bit platform?
    Implementing hardware and firmware support for a 64-bit system requires special considerations that differ from 32-bit platform design. Microsoft Windows Hardware and Drivers Central is a great place to start learning about 64-bit hardware. For more information, please see the 64-bit Platform articles and the Device Drivers area of MSDN.
  • What drivers come with Windows XP x64 and where do I go to get other drivers?
    Windows XP ships with a set of predefined drivers, often called inbox drivers. To obtain 3rd party drivers, drivers not included with Windows XP, you'll need to contact your preferred vendor.

Database Connectivity

  • Are ODBC or OLE DB supported in 64-bit Windows?
    Yes, both ODBC and OLE DB are supported i 64-bit Windows. For more information, please see the ODBC 64-Bit Information in the MSDN Library. The Microsoft OLE DB Core Services and the Microsoft SQL Server OLE DB Provider has been updated to support 64-bit Windows. These updates involve several API changes. If you are porting 32-bit OLE DB code to 64-bits, you will need to make changes to your code. Several new typedefs have been defined in the OLE DB header file. These new types allow you to maintain one set of source code for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. The simplest way to ensure that your code will compile in either 32-bit or 64-bit environments is to make sure that the code uses these new typedefs for variable definitions. For more information, please see the OLE DB 64-Bit Information in the MSDN Library.

Decorating Drivers

  • What is a decorated device driver and how do I decorate my device drivers to get them to install?
    An INF section is considered to be decorated when its name contains a TargetOSVersion suffix that identifies a particular platform and operating system. Decorated sections contain installation information that is relevant only to the platform and operating system specified by TargetOSVersion. If the device driver uses INF files for installation and the driver is not decorated, the driver will not install. Please check the INF files of third party devices and make sure the INF files have been decorated. For more information, please see the article INF Requirements for 64-bit Systems.
  • Why do drivers that install on x64 (i.e., AMD and Intel EM64T) need to be decorated to work?
    Decorated drivers help protect users from installing INF-based device driver packages on the wrong system platform, and help manufacturers avoid the associated support costs. For more information, please see the article INF Requirements for 64-bit Systems.
  • Where can I learn about decorating 64-bit INF drivers?
    Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later versions of Windows do not install driver packages with undecorated INF sections on x64-based systems. For more information, please see the article INF Requirements for 64-bit Systems.
  • I can't locate a decorated driver from the manufacturer, how do I install an undecorated driver that uses x64 technology?
    Note  These workarounds are intended only for use on test systems and are not recommended for production drivers. There are two workarounds for installing undecorated drivers. Option 1 is to edit the INF to manually add decorations as in the example below:

    [Manufacturer]
    %mycompany% = MyCompanyModels,NTamd64

    [MyCompanyModels.NTamd64]
    %MyDev% = mydevInstall,mydevHwid

    This will break the signature of a signed driver, but will allow the driver to be installed (subject to the signed driver policy in effect on the local machine.) Option 2 is for AMD64 systems only. You can turn off the undecorated models check by creating the following non-zero numeric registry value:

    HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup: REG_DWORD:
    DisableDecoratedModelsRequirement For more information, please see the article INF Requirements for 64-bit Systems.

Networking

  • Why can't I install my network adapter after upgrading to Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition?
    All kernel-mode components, including device drivers, need to be 64-bit on 64-bit Windows. Contact the manufacturer to verify 64-bit driver availability and obtain the latest drivers.

Printers

  • Why don't the printer drivers automatically update when installed in a clustered environment?
    After you update a printer driver on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based print server that is in a clustered environment, some of the client computers' printer drivers may not be automatically updated. For example, the next time a client computer connects to your print server, the client computer’s local printer driver might not be automatically updated as expected. For more information, please see Knowledge Base article 888744.
  • Why can't I print the watermark, print multiple pages of a document on a single piece of paper, or use collate features when printing a document?
    The problem occurs because the Microsoft print architecture requires a default printer driver on the server to the Print Processor. Some non-standard network print providers cannot do this. Therefore, the print queue may spool the job as raw data and skip the Print Processor driver. When this happens, certain printer features do not work correctly. For more information, please see Knowledge Base article 884897.

Storage Management

  • After using F6 to successfully install storage drivers, why do I receive a bug check 7B on restart?
    The difficulty arises because the F6 mechanism does not use the SetupAPI logic to load the storage drivers. You can manually decorate the INF files or get a newer version of the driver that uses 64-bit INF decorations. For more information, please see the Directory Changes for Vendor-provided Storage Drivers.

Processors

  • Which processors (CPUs) are supported by Windows 64-bit operating system?
    64-bit editions of Windows run on the AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon 64, Intel Xeon EM64T, Intel Pentium 4 with EM64T, and Intel Itanium processors (including the Itanium2).
  • Which Microsoft operating systems work on an x64-based system?
    Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition; Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition; and Windows Server 2003, Datacenter x64 Edition. For more information, please see the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Overview and the Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions Product Overview.
  • What tools are available to test components on my computer?
    BurnIn64 is a burn-in tool designed to run on x64 systems, such as those based on AMD Opteron, AMD Athlon64, and Intel Pentium 4 with EM64T processors. Burnin64 tests the CPU, motherboard, memory, and hard drive. For more information about BurnIn64, please visit the Burnin64 product page (https://www.7byte.com/index.php?page=burnin64). Note  The third-party Web site above is not sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.
  • Why do system utilities, such as Microsoft System Diagnostics (WinMSD), report 256 MB less physical memory than the 4 GB (or more) of memory that is actually installed?
    This issue can occur if a server is using the Intel Profusion chipset. In the read-only (ROM) memory of the computer, the upper 256-MB memory region is reserved for memory-mapped input/output (I/O) devices. The amount of reserved physical memory may increase to 512 MB or more depending on the number of I/O devices that are installed on the computer. Typically, a computer that has 4 gigabytes (GB) of actual physical memory looks as if it has 3.84 GB of total physical memory. For more information, please see Knowledge Base article 279151.