Vendors can elect to provide their own IDE controller minidriver instead of using the native minidriver, pciide.sys. The IDE controller driver, pciidex.sys, handles the hardware-independent aspects of the driver pair, and the minidriver, pciide.sys, handles the hardware-dependent aspects. Microsoft provides a native IDE controller driver/minidriver pair that is capable of managing most IDE controllers. The IDE stack in Windows 2000 and Windows XP is layered over the PCI bus driver. Starting from the bottom of the figure, the following describes each driver in the stack: All three drivers are illustrated in the following figure. There are three system-supplied drivers in the IDE driver model for Windows 2000 and Windows XP: atapi.sys (port driver), pciidex.sys (controller driver), and pciide.sys (generic controller minidriver). In Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the IDE port driver atapi.sys is an independent driver that no longer links to scsiport.sys, nor to any other wrapper driver. In Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, the port/miniport driver pair associated with the IDE bus is a SCSI miniport driver, atapi.sys, that linked to the SCSI port driver, scsiport.sys. Instead, we recommend using the Storport driver and Storport miniport driver models. The ATA port driver and ATA miniport driver models may be altered or unavailable in the future.
