I have a CF-Card installed in my old good Compaq iPAQ H3630, now i got an IBM Thinkpad R51 i tried to connect the CF-Card with an PCMCIA Adapter to my laptop, Windows detects a hardware called: "256MB" uses the driver "PCMCIA IDE/ATAPI Controller" and then it says: "The driver is not intended for this platform". I tried the same thing on Windows 9x/Me and 2000 without experencing any problems or needing drivers. The iPAQ has Pocket PC 2002 and it also worked without a driver. Can anyone tell me why this happens?

I imagine it's simply XP being fussy - it doesn't like older drivers. Only thing you can do is go to the adapter manufacturer's website & see if there's an updated XP driver.

"I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

I have the exact same problem. My sandisk pcmcia CF card reader and transcend 256mb CF card yield 'the driver is not intended for this platform' after reinstall of XP. The same setup with the same cards worked perfectly though a previous 3-4 installations of XP. I can't find drivers for any of the devices. The card still does work fine when attached through a USB card reader, but it's stupid that I can't use my PCMCIA reader. Any help would be great.

I have the same problem. Unfortunately, on their website there is no driver. It has not been developed yet.

Tel.: +40722497929
Fax.: +40722111568

I had this problem too.... I found a corrupted atapi.sys driver in C:\windows\system32\drivers.

Simply delete or rename this file, then go to your device manager, (right click on my computer, choose "properties", then the "hardware" tab, then click "Device Manager") Once in device manager, you should see the compact flash card under "disk Drives" with the yellow exclamation point next to it. Double-click it then choose "reinstall driver". Voila!

I think this corrupt file was caused by a CD-emulation utility I installed. It may "break" this utility, so you may have to reinstall later if you are using this.

-Phil

regarding Phil's instructions, i did try to delete the atapi.sys but it has a rights issue, saying i can't delete it because its not in use, and then i found out that all IDE devices use that one file, so i'm a bit wary of deleting it from a dos prompt or boot disk shell. my laptop is a IBM R31 and i just bought the 4-in-1 PCMCIA card reader. having the same problem as the rest of you guys. any help would be greatly appreciated cuz i'm at my wits end!
:)

ATAPI.SYS is not used for your disk drives. ATAPI is a subset of ATA (ide) for allowing non-disc periperals such as CD-ROMs, Tape Drives, and Compact Flash to use an ATA bus along with ATA hard drives.

Read this to understand more if you care:
http://www.ata-atapi.com/hist.htm

Modern machines don't use ATAPI for CD/DVD drives anymore, so the only thing that could be using it would be some other device that emulates ATA. External USB stroage devices might. Either way, just go into safe mode and RENAME it, that you you have nothing to loose if something breaks. Then reboot in normal mode and follow my instructions (in the post above) to get the Compact Flash working again. This procedure will fix the "Driver is not intended for this platform" error when installing compact flash on XP.

-Phil

Yup, Alcohol 120% :)

Thank you so much for preventing the mental breakdown that was quickly approaching as I tried to figure this one out...

- Morgan

This is caused by the Alcohol Virtual Drive software as described on their website in a bug report. The lock on ATAPI.SYS should be fixed with a future update of Alcohol.
http://forum.alcohol-soft.com/index.php?showtopic=13902