Device manager is empty

  • Thread starter Thread starter lukasz
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lukasz

Hello,

Recently I've noticed that modem on my system is not responding. While
trying to locate it in the Device Manger I've realized that it's empty.
That's right, there is nothing showing up in Device Manager.

I've checked my Plug-n-Play service and it's running.

Any ideas on how I can fix it?

I'm running w2k prof. w/sp4.

Thanks.
 
lukasz said:
Hello,

Recently I've noticed that modem on my system is not responding. While
trying to locate it in the Device Manger I've realized that it's empty.
That's right, there is nothing showing up in Device Manager.

I've checked my Plug-n-Play service and it's running.

Any ideas on how I can fix it?

I'm running w2k prof. w/sp4.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

With Device Manager open, click View->Show hidden devices. Does anything
show up now?

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
davcraiguk said:
Thanks for the response. See below.



I pesume you mean administrator here, but how do I check/set this?
Click to expand...

No, SYSTEM is different than Administrator.

Start->Run
REGDT32

Browse to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum

Click Security->Permissions

SYSTEM must be present.

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
The link was provided as the way to get the modem properties while the
DeviceManager is malfunctioning.
 
davcraiguk said:
Thanks Mike,
SYSTEM was missing so I added it. Should 'Read' and 'Full Control' be
Click to expand...
allowed? Also is there anything in the advanced button to set?

Yes, 'Read' and 'Full Control' should be checked for SYSTEM.

You may want to set the owner to an Administrator account (if it isn't
already), but that's not important right now.
Under Permissions, you should have "Allow - SYSTEM - Full Control - This key
and subkeys" in addition to anything else that's in there. Make sure there
is no conflicting permission set to DENY control by SYSTEM.

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
davcraiguk said:
Resolution!

Thank you everyone. Device Manager is now back. How SYSTEM got removed
Click to expand...
from permissions is beyond me. I noticed a few other posts on similar
subjects under other Technet forums. Maybe something like spybot (the only
thing I installed in months) nobbled it! Who knows
There's a lot of poorly written software (including device drivers) out
there. Probably the most common occurence of this type of problem that I've
seen is the key type for the PATH statement being changed mysteriously. I
still don't know the reason that happens, but it's a very similar fix and an
extremely common one. Luckily, there are enough people who have already had
these problems that they're pretty well-documented and can be fixed easily
:)

--

Mike Brown
Asset Forwarding Corp.
EPA-compliant Recycling
DoD 5220.22-M Data Elimination
http://www.assetforwarding.com
 
Mike said:
There's a lot of poorly written software (including device drivers) out
there. Probably the most common occurence of this type of problem that I've
seen is the key type for the PATH statement being changed mysteriously. I
still don't know the reason that happens,
Click to expand...
Hi

The reason: The badly written installation program reads the original
path data from registry, adds it's own entry to the path string, and
then writes the updated path string back to registry as type "REG_SZ"
instead of "REG_EXPAND_SZ"...
 
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