install /Uninstall drivers - something is screwy

[davexnet]

Hello - I have an Nvidia Nforce board. This problems concerns the install/uninstall of the
Nforce chipset. (XP SP3)
They install OK. However, upon uninstalling from add/remove programs, the uninstaller
neither lists nor uninstalls the SATA driver. The uninstaller used to uninstall it
and put back the default Microsoft registry entries for IDE ATA/Atapi controllers -
so the next time you booted the device manager reflected the default MS drivers
were now in use.

So I can never uninstall the Nvidia SATA driver, just install a new driver over the top.
(which as far as I can see works OK)

My question is, how can I restore the default MS ATA/Atapi environment?
Right now, with Nvidia SATA installed, the items listed are:

Nvidia Nforce serial ATA
Primary IDE channel
Secondary IDE channel
Standard dual channel PCI IDE controller

 

[sm625]

I'd recommend a full backup before doing this....

1. Uninstall as you said, using add/remove programs.
2. Uninstall using device manager.
3. Go into your windows/inf folder and search through all oem*.inf files for the text "nvidia". My pc has 3 such files -- two for the display and one for an azalia thingy. Surely yours will have one that for ata. Once you find that oem* file, make a note of its number. I'm going to pretend it is oem37.inf for the next step.
4. Search and delete all files named oem37.* There should be two, a inf file, and a pnf file.
5. Once those are gone, reboot. Windows should install the default driver from M$.

 

[imagoon]

I would recommend the storage or windows forums. Your issue isn't "highly technical" so you won't get many people responding here because they will be actively ignoring your post.

 

[davexnet]

sm625 thanks for your suggestion, however, I tried something similar earlier.
(see below)

How can I contact a a moderator to move this thread to the Memory and Storage
forum?

I'm not sure if I did all those steps you mentioned,
whether it was the same,or if I did too much "cleaning". In any event,
it failed extremely early into the boot (about 1 or 2 seconds, the screen was black)
with "nvgts.sys is missing, press "r" to repair Windows".

Since I have a dual boot, I just booted to the other OS and copied nvgts.sys
back to the other OS's \windows\system32\drivers and it was back in business.

I have Vista on the Box, in that OS it behaves a little differently.
If you uninstall the SATA from device manager it asks you if you want to also delete the
driver files. If you do, Windows starts OK, and reinstalls the SATA HDD drive itself as well
as the controller components.