complex driver question

[Alterac000]

i recently unplugged a netgear FA312 nic from my system w/o uninstalling the drivers first. Part of the reason I did that was because my system basically turned off by itself, and then it wouldn't let me turn back on w/o unplugging the NIC out of the motherboard. Now, I have residual FA312 drivers on my win2k system, and I have bought a new Belkin NIC and installed it. However, it seems that win2k is trying to detect my old FA312 despite the fact that I manually went through the hard drive and deleted all FA312 files I could find. My mouse cursor locks up every once in a while, which seems to be a symptom of win2k trying to detect the old FA312. Does anyone know of a way to get win2k to completely clean its driver base, or reinstall only the plugged in devices from scratch? Thanks for any of your help.

Duron 800@960
Epox 8k7a
512 crucial ddr
Some belkin FD5000 NIC
Aureal sq2500
IBM deskstar 60gxp
hauppage wintv-d


speaking of, anyone hear anything about aureal drivers from xp working in 2k?

 

[c0rv1d43]

The easiest way, and the first thing I'd try under the circumstances, would be to go into Device Manager and use the View menu to set DM to display "Hidden Devices". Then look down through the list to see if the old NIC drivers show up and dispatch the suckers. If just deleting the drivers that are obviously associated with the Netgear NIC doesn't do it, you may actually need to get rid of ALL NIC drivers and have the system redetect your present card. That's because some of the "generalized" drivers may have been built by the system to include references to the old NIC.

Otherwise, I think it's a matter of trying to locate all of the files and registry entries that were installed for the old NIC and excise them from the system. In that case, it would still be best (I think) to go ahead and have the new card redetected by the OS for much the same reasons as noted above.

Good luck.

- Collin

 

[Alterac000]

-c0rv1d43

Thanks for the help. However I ran into some difficulties.

First, when going through the registry searching for "netgear" and "fa312," there are certain keys that just won't delete..I get an error saying "unable to delete all specific values."

I manually removed all NIC drivers I could find, uninstalled tcp/ip, netbios, ipx/spx, etc, then I uninstalled my F5D5000.

I ran regclean 4.1, let it do whatever it could.

I renamed the drivers.cab in c:\winnt\driver cache\i386\driver.cab to driver.cat just so 2k wouldn't be tempted to use its old drivers

I tried going to device manager and showing hidden devices but no netgear or any other NIC was found. I tried to remove anything I could.

Alas, after all that work, still the same. I can tell that the system is still looking for hardware because of the perpetual mouse freezes .. these last like half a second, brief, but are annoying. I can also tell the system still has residual FA312 stuff because in Administrative tools, computer management, system information, components, network, adaptor, there is a listing of info for Name: [00000005] This is where a Netgear FA312 used to show before i deleted the drivers and as many registry keys as I could. But where it says "Installed" next to it says "True".

What a big mess.. again thanks for the help, if you have any more ideas please let me know I would really appreciate it, hopefully a clean install of win2k will be a last resort

 

[c0rv1d43]

Damn! You are welcome to smack me on the forehead if you wish! I forgot to tell you that you should boot into Safe Mode WITHOUT Networking before going to the blooming Device Manager to do the NIC device deletions! Naturally, you can't delete a device driver while the OS is still "driving" the device! Damn, that was dumb of me!

There is a more extreme method of dealing with this. People who are trying to change from Standard PC HAL to ACPI HAL have used this technique with mixed success. I do NOT recommend trying it unless you're a) very adventuresome, and b) ready to throw in the towel and do a full reinstall anyway. It is related to what you mentioned in your first message. I have actually done it once on a test machine just to see what would happen. It worked just fine, but I have no idea whether that was dumb luck or just the way it goes normally. That test machine was in perfect working order with MB and all devices known to be ACPI-compliant. I received a deliberately forced Standard PC HAL install of Windows 2000 Professional. We then deleted the entire HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum structure from the registry and rebooted. Worked like a charm, going through and properly detecting every device and using the files already there but installing the whole thing as ACPI-compliant this time.

Let me point out that this was not a production machine, it was not experiencing any device problems (and therefore did not have any known farkled drivers installed on it), and it was a different OS than the one we're discussing. (However, I suspect that WinXP is better at this sort of thing than is Windows 2000.) Oh yeah, did I mention that THIS WAS NOT A PRODUCTION MACHINE??? I would NOT do this on a production machine unless I were truly at the point where the next step was a full, clean reinstallation of the OS and software.

If you can't afford to risk the full setup time and effort right now, I suggest we see if someone can come up with a better solution. And, of course, you might try the Safe Mode trip to Device Manager that my ancient and addled brain forgot to describe properly.

- Collin

 

[c0rv1d43]

Oops! Also forgot to mention that I don't think that renaming CAB files in the dllcache is such a good idea. WFP is a good thing to have running. Although the driver file complement may be part of your problem here, I'm pretty sure the biggest problem is some errant device enumerations in the registry. After all the OS won't usually try to use libraries and drivers unless they are registered. (I know there are exceptions, and notable among those are some driver sets.)

I'll hope to hear that you've figured something out.

- Collin

 

[Alterac000]

alright, so I went ahead and tried using safe mode w/o networking.. still would not allow me to delete some of the other network devices such as WAN and Netbui. So I went ahead and tried to delete the enum registry.. no go, I think I made a mistake, and ended up having to repair my win2k installation. Repair didn't work (though thank god I made those 4 startup disks), so I did a new full installation of win2k. Needless to say, it took the entire day yesterday to do it, which really sucked because I have a final today that is going to kill me! I finally figured out how to move all my old express email files into the correct new express directory and have it read correctly. Man this has been one long and torturous ordeal. And you know what? My mouse STILL does the same locking thing. What is going on here? Now I am feeling a little bit of a fool to think that perhaps the problem wasn't ghosted device drivers from the FA312 afterall, but rather some other hardware/software conflict. Man...perhaps it is time for me to take a trip to Best Buy and try and find a linksys/intel NIC. Suggestions/Opinions on this? Is the Belkin just a really low-grade NIC that could do this? If so, I've never heard anyone else have complaints like this so I don't see how that could be the problem. At this point however, it seems like anything goes. Thanks again for your help, let me know if you have any other ideas.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Sometimes you just have to go through all of this to prove to yourself that it's really a hardware problem. Win2K and WinXP pretty much look at a bad driver as bad hardware. There's really little or no difference as far as the OS is concerned. This stuff does always seem to happen when you can least afford the time.

One thing I can suggest now is to try to prove which device isn't getting along with others by removing the ones that can be removed (from DM first, then physically during the following shutdown) and bringing the system back up to check its behavior. This could be almost any device that isn't fully ACPI-complaint, though there could be other compliance issues as well. One other thing you might do before getting started to help you start with the most likely suspect (an unsigned driver) would be to run the "sigverif" utility. Unsigned drivers that this utility lists might poing to the problem. But if the problem is caused by an actual hardware failure, then this won't be productive. One other thing I'd suggest is to open Task Manager to the Processes tab and watch the list of processes to see if one of them is peaking during the mouse freezes. That could point you toward a service or non-service process, and that could help you find an associated hardware / device culprit. Requires a little backtracking sometimes, but I've had this approach be effective before.

I hope the final goes okay.

- Collin

 

[Alterac000]

well after working on this for a few more days, now I'm seriously stumped. I returned the belkin NIC and bought a linksys LNE100TX. I made sure to do a proper uninstall of the belkin before installing the linksys. I reinstalled all drivers i had for devices in my system - radeon LE, aureal sq2500, Hauppage wintv-d, lne100tx, even installed old VIA 4-in-1's and new ones to see if i could get this stupid mouse lockup thing to go away. The thing is, I *never* had this problem before i removed my netgear FA312 NIC, so I don't understand why any of my old devices should be an issue now. Even just sitting down and brainstorming for possible errors, I dont' see what else could be going wrong. I even uninstalled VIA bus master drivers to see if maybe something was going on with weird hard drive activity that was causing these lockups. My mouse locks up not only in graphics/sound intensive applications such as 3d games, but also just during regular use such as web browsing/word processing. SO STRANGE! blah. Well thanks for all your help, looks like you're the only one with input, i don't expect you to keep on racking your brain for possibilities to this so no worries if you can't think of anything, but this is one hardware (software?) issue that has seriously stumped me after all these years of experience

 

[Bozo Galora]

sounds like an IRQ conflict to me. the mouse tries to use the bus, but is interrupted by something else, like
the graphics card. the fact you added a card, after removing another causing the prob reinforces this.
Are you using ACPI where all your peripherals share IRQ9 or 11?
what I would do is uncheck PNP O/S in the BIOS, enable ESCD Update and boot - letting the bios set
the hardware up.
failing that, I would go into bios and disable ACPI (manual), reinstall 2K with E:\setup /p_i switch to
disallow ACPI coding.
did you install specific mouse drivers?
have you tried taking out all card except video to see if mouse works then? this would really be the test.


Edit: also disabling com 1 and com 2 in bios is very important here, assuming you dont use them

 

[c0rv1d43]

Bummer. I will continue to turn the old gears over on this over the rest of the weekend. But I think it's basically still just a matter of either removing devices one-at-a-time until the behavior goes away or (my favorite way) removing them all first to see if the behavior goes away, then restoring devices to the system until the problem rears its ugly head. If you remove all but the absolute basic devices and the problem persists, then you're usually looking at a re-install.

Bozo Galora is probably right in saying that -- if the last scenario listed above is the one in which you find yourself -- doing something basic with the HAL may work. However, I've never seen a modern system on which this turns out to be a truly useful setup. Being IRQ bound is a bear. The fix for problems with IRQ sharing is to use devices which are truly ACPI-compliant, not to defeat one of the most basic functions of the OS. IRQ Steering was developed for a very good reason. Those of us who remember buying new systems which were already devoid of usable remaining interrupts can vouch for that. But you have to do what you have to do.

I will keep turning this over, as I said before, and I will most certainly get back to you if I come up with anything. But issues this persistent are usually solved by elbow grease and one-step-at-a-time trouble-shooting. Or maybe that's just the way they get solved when one happens to be saddled with a limited mentality like mine!

- Collin