Help! What's going on?

[Jonitus]

Twice in the past two days, I have had something really wierd happen to my system.

Bringing the computer out of standby, I am greeted by 5 open windows which say "Improper Removal of Hardware Device. If you want to remove this device from your system, use "Add/Remove Hardware" from your Control Panel"

The following devices are supposedly removed:

COM2
USB Controller
Primary IDE controller
Secondary IDE controller
Printer

...goofy thing is, I can hit "cancel" on all the dialog boxes, and my hardware runs fine. The hardware shows up in device manager as "This device is functioning properly".

After I close out all the dialog boxes, about 1 minute later, I get two dialog boxes which tell me "New Hardware Found"

The following hardware is being installed:

PCI Multimedia Controller
PCI PnP Audio Device

...I haven't modified/changed a single thing in my system all week. I haven't installed/uninstalled anything. I haven't added/removed any hardware. What's going on?

This whole thing happens only after the computer comes out of standby, no other time. After I close out all this crap, my system works just fine.

Anybody know what's going on?

...Nogginboink?

 

[NogginBoink]

Sounds like a bad BIOS.

Plug and Play depends on device insert and removal notifications. So, for instance, when you plug in a USB thingy, the USB port tells the USB driver that there's a new thingy on the bus. The USB driver then enumerates the thingy and tells the rest of the OS that it can use the thingy by raising a device insert notification.

Same thing in reverse when you remove a USB thingy.

The catch is that when the OS thinks there's hardware there, it can behave very unpredictably when the hardware just disappears with no warning.

In standby mode, the OS is not running, so it can't generate device insert and removal notifications.

It sounds to me like, when your system goes into standby, it sees all of these hardware devices, but when it resumes from hibernation, it can't find those hardware devices.

In this case, it seems that the BIOS is not managing the transition to/from hibernate properly.

Of course, you're not allowed to add/remove hardware for real, either, when the system is in hibernate.

 

[Jonitus]

...so, should I scour the internet looking for a BIOS update? I recently flashed mine to the most recent one. The program said the flash went sucessfully. Should I go to an older version?