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

 

[DanTMWTMP]

safe mode

 

[L1FE]

safe mode doesn't disable cd-rom devices

 

[DanTMWTMP]

doh...

do you have any CDROM support software such as Daemon tools? If so, get rid of it. I think nortons has a similar software...

try updating your chipset drivers.

If you have intel, update the intel application accelerator.

 

[L1FE]

Most of this was caused by daemon tools and a bad upgrade (which somehow caused the phantom drive). It's been uninstalled, but apparently it's aftereffects are still there.

 

[DanTMWTMP]

I had to delete the daemon tools registry under software in regedit, so i can finally use my cdrom heh.

I think there's a regcleaner that can search all of the registry for files relating to the program.

Using nortons windoctor may help...don't think it will though..

 

[L1FE]

all the daemon tools registry entries were manually deleted, but those aren't the problem right now 🙁 I found the generic dvd entries but they won't go away