stopping devices from loading on windows startup?

[L1FE]

So after an hour or so of trouble shooting a phantom virtual dvd-rom drive (don't ask) I finally narrowed it down to some registry entries that refuse to go away. I try to delete them, but of course because Windows is running, the entries refuse to be deleted.

What I'm able to do is uninstall the generic dvd drive and the generic scsi controllers from the device manager. However, every time I reboot they mysteriously reappear.

I would regedit in dos, but for some reason after using my boot disk, it somehow mixes up my partitions and only allows me to see my "g:" drive, as opposed to my windows system boot partition. I don't know why.

What I'm wondering then is if there's a way to make my windows boot without loading the controllers and dvd drive. Then I'll hopefully be able to remove those pesky entries. Any thoughts?

edit: Windows XP Pro SP1

 

[TiziteLayinLow]

try running msconfig on the run menu and goto diagnostic mode

that will only load the minimal drivers

 

[NogginBoink]

You have a poor understanding of your problem.

You can set HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\<drivername>\Start=4 to disable the device driver.

But I'm reasonably confident this won't solve your problem.

 

[Nothinman]

I believe you can disable services/drivers from the Recovery Console as well, it's one of the very few usefull things MS included in it IIRC.

 

[imported_Mavros]

These phantom dvd drives...do you have any custom software installed like image loaders or video players??? Sometimes this software adds a virtual drive that appears there but is just present for the application.