Jaypie said:
Hi,
I'm using windows 7 with IE 8.
An unknown device appeared on my system. This device affected
the printer which did not want to connect to the computer.
So I deleted the unknown device thinking the printer would be ok.
But it's not the case. I did a restore to a previous date, re-installed
the printer and the problem is still there.
A search in Google results in the fact that I should do a full system
recovery. If I do so, will Windows be re-installed ?
My computer is a compaq one and I have the installation cds
supplied by the company.
Does somebody know what should be done ?
Thank you.
Jaypie
OK, you've described some things, that I don't have on my Windows 7 laptop.
If I run "devmgmt.msc", and look at Device Manager,
I have features such as:
Uninstall
Disable
Scan for changes
These to me, all imply "reverse-ability", meaning you
can't really damage things. If you enable the device
again, it becomes a candidate. If you uninstalled it,
then a "scan for changes" should attempt to install it again.
One way to remove a device, is disable it from the BIOS, using
the BIOS setup screen. Certain peripheral chips (my motherboard
Firewire chip), can be disabled that way. The hardware chip select
is effectively disabled, which prevents it from showing up when
an OS is running. That's a very effective way to remove hardware,
except only a small percentage of peripheral chips are handled
that way. Lots of system devices, will be running in any case.
On a Compaq (a pre-built computer), they don't normally offer
a lot of options like that. Because they could be a trap for
a customer (disable device, not be able to figure out how
to bring it back again).
But as far as the OS is concerned, it looks like the
design attempts to be "trap free", and operates in a
way such that available hardware can't "get lost".
*******
This article, is Microsoft's answer.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/...-hardware-isnt-working-properly=windows-vista
There is a short video (thankfully, not Silverlight!).
http://wm.microsoft.com/ms/woh/023_repairdriver.wmv
What you can do with that, is not necessary "click" anything to
install a driver update. But at least look at the list of proposed
drivers that Windows Update offers, to see if any of them have
no corresponding item in Device Manager. That may give some idea
what the Unknown one is. (I.e. See an offered driver update
that you've never heard of before, and conclude the Unknown
device corresponds to it.)
When you plug in a printer, like an All-In-One printer with scanner
and the like, those are "Composite" devices. More than one piece of
hardware "hides" behind the main detection that a device is present.
This causes no problem for the OS particularly. My only reason for
mentioning this, is, in a sense, installing a modern printer, is
like installing multiple hardware devices at the same time. The
printer section may have a separate piece of driver code, from
the scanner section.
So what else can a printer include ? Some printers will have a slot
for a USB key, into which you can plug a USB key with pictures you
want printed. Others will have an SD memory chip slot, where
you can plug the SD you pulled out of your camera. Some of these
devices may require a driver as well (although, the driver is
probably included as a built-in function of the OS, and should
"just work").
One of the things the Apple OS has, is a graphical representation
of hardware, and sometimes subtending pieces of hardware, can be
seen below a main device. In Windows, you might use UVCView to
see some of the information. But it won't be in a convenient
graphical form, and neither will it be particularly easy to decode.
And utilities like UVCView and DEVCON, useful as they are,
are a bitch to locate, download, and extract. Microsoft doesn't
really understand the notion of "useful", like the stuff in
their Sysinternals site provides. They should move things like
UVCView and DEVCON, over to Sysinternals.
In fact, most of Device Manager functions, are like a skeleton
of a complete implementation. Everything is fine, if the enumeration
system can find a match, or find a driver on Windows Update. But
if you have a truly "Unknown" device, it can be the devil to
figure out. While there is one utility that attempts to automate
this issue, the description for it indicates it doesn't cover
all hardware bus types. And as such, even that utility cannot
guarantee it can uncover just anything. We know the OS can
uncover anything, but it refuses to barf up the details
for the unknown ones. It must have plenty of information it
could offer us. Yet, no evidence of that, in any of the
setupapi.* files.
In a Device Manager entry, you can examine properties. And there
is a tab where the properties can be examined one by one. For
detected devices, you can probably see a thing like "HW ID",
which would include VEN/DEV or VID/PID numbers, or mention
HDAUDIO bus, PCI bus, AGP bus, and so on. These are the
numbers the enumeration system uses, to match up drivers.
But when an entry is completely unknown, not sitting in a
"section" of Device Manager, you don't even get a tab to
look at! How useless is that ? The complete set of tabs
is not present, on truly unknown devices.
Try Windows Update, and see if there are any optional
driver installations, that don't match what you've got
in Device Manager. Maybe that way, you can narrow down
what it is.
*******
If you boot a Linux LiveCD, you can run "sudo lshw" or
"sudo lspci" or "sudo lsusb" from a terminal window. And
gather information about the hardware in the computer.
I don't know if all ACPI objects (hardware devices passed
by the BIOS), get included there or not. But that is
another avenue to researching unknown devices - comparing
to what Linux can detect.
Doing a reinstall at this point, would be the furthest
thing from my mind. I've only been completely defeated
just once, when a Windows OS would no longer provide
3D hardware acceleration for games, and I tried every
driver cleaner under the sun to fix it. Other than that,
a little hammering here and there, usually fixes things up.
Paul
),