Failed to uninstall the device. Device may be required to boot upcomputer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Curious George
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Curious George

My NIC stopped working yesterday, and Device Manager reported that it
had problems (Error 31) because Windows could not load the driver. So I
attempted to uninstall it so that Windows could re-find it and
re-install. I received the error message: "Failed to uninstall the
device. Device may be required to boot up computer."

In Googling this error message, I found suggestions to show "ghost"
devices in device manager by using set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1.
There were no such ghost devices. When I set DM to "show hidden
devices," there were a bunch of WAN miniports and other network-related
entries, and perhaps I should have deleted all of them, but I didn't.
No devices, other than the main NIC entry, showed the yellow Splat.

I found a MSKB suggestion to download and use a special MS tool, DevCon
("a command line utility that acts as an alternative to Device
Manager"). But when I ran the "remove" command from this tool, it
responded, "no devices removed."

I found suggestions to search the registry and set permissions, but that
didn't seem to be the answer either. At least, I couldn't find a likely
key on which the permissions were set incorrectly.

I found suggestions that the problem might have been "Wake On Lan," but
when I went into BIOS, there was no setting for WOL. There was a BIOS
setting to have the 4th boot device (after CD, floppy, hard drive) be
PXE, which I understand to be a boot-from-network option, so I disabled
that. That wasn't the solution.

I eventually fixed the situation by restoring from a Ghost image, so the
problem wasn't hardware. I had already come to the conclusion that it
wasn't a hardware problem, because the "LAN connect" light on my router
would come on early in the boot process but then go off as Windows took
control.

I'm OK now, but if anyone has any insight into this issue, particularly
how to remove devices (is it only NICs?) that Windows claims "may" be
needed to boot, I'd really like to know for future reference. And it
probably will come up again.

By the way, attempting to uninstall the NIC in Safe Mode didn't help,
but interestingly, now that things are working again, the "LAN connect"
light stays on, even though the NIC is not operative in Safe Mode.
 
I would vae removed the hardware then to display hidden devices, non-Plug
and Play devices, and devices not attached to the computer (commonly known
as "ghosted" or "phantom" devices)

Save the following two lines as a file then execute.

--------------------------setdev.bat---------------------
set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
start devmgmt.msc
---------------------------------------------------------

Then, View|Show Hidden Devices to remove or reconfigure these devices. Do
not edit the registry.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect
 
Hi

First read this, http://www.ezlan.net/faq#ghost

Uninstall any thing related to this specific NIC in the Device Manager, take
the NIC out (or disable it if it is onboard) and boot one time without an
NIC.

Switch Off, re-insert the NIC (if it is PCI try another slot), make sure
that you have the recent drivers and try to install.

Does Not work? Get a New NIC they go for $5-$10 and there is reason to lose
sleep over it.

Jack (MVP-Networking).


Dave Patrick said:
I would vae removed the hardware then to display hidden devices, non-Plug
and Play devices, and devices not attached to the computer (commonly known
as "ghosted" or "phantom" devices)

Save the following two lines as a file then execute.

--------------------------setdev.bat---------------------
set DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1
start devmgmt.msc
---------------------------------------------------------

Then, View|Show Hidden Devices to remove or reconfigure these devices. Do
not edit the registry.

--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

Curious George said:
I didn't think to try resetting TCP/IP with netsh, and perhaps that might
have helped, but none of the regular networking troubleshooting tools
would have worked: the NIC completely failed to load, and wasn't even
showing in Network Connections.
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