Good works are not always rewarded

  • Thread starter Thread starter Casian Moscovici
  • Start date Start date
C

Casian Moscovici

Hi folks

My son was experiencing some problems booting his W2K system. Like a
good dad I offered to help troubleshoot. Among my troubleshooting
activities I connected both his drives, one at a time, to my W2K system
in order to verify their integrity, check for viruses, etc., etc.

Since this post is not actually about his problems, I won't go into any
details about what I discovered other than to say that his drives looked
perfectly healthy.

However, this modest attempt to help him did create a minor problem for
me. When I installed each of the two drives on my system, W2K cheerfully
announced it had unearthed new hardware and helpfully offered to install
the hardware and new drivers. I declined the offer, knowing that these
two drives were never going to be seen again, but a message popped up
saying generic drivers had been loaded anyway and advising me to restart
the PC for the changes to take effect.

Ever since that fateful day of good works W2K has been extremely slow
starting up. Though I do not see any signs of my son's drives in device
manager, computer management, event logs, or startup routines, I have
the nagging feeling that every time W2K loads it is looking for those
drives.

Any suggestions on a) how to confirm this suspicion and b) how to make
W2K stop looking for the drives if indeed it is?

Many thanks for your help

Casian
 
Were the new drives IDE? Were they attached to your existing IDE
ports or did they have a separate controller card?

Rick
 
2 thoughts

1) Either your IDE or SCSI drivers were replaced
2) You might be right about looking for the old drives. Check the
following registry keys for volumes that do not exist on your machine:

HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

If there are any DosDevices that you are certain that don't exist on
your system, you can delete them. Also, delete the entries above whose
values match the DosDevices values.

MAKE SURE YOU UPDATE/CREATE YOUR ERD W/ NTBACKUP.EXE BEFORE MAKING ANY
MAJOR CHANGES TO THE SYSTEM OR REGISTRY.

hth
 
Thanks for your ideas. As it turns out, the problem disappeared by
itself. W2K loaded at its usual speed today and there was nothing that
didn't belong in the registry key you mentioned. I guess it gave up
looking for the temporary drives.

I sometimes wish Microsoft products wouldn't try to be so darned
helpful. It's not always wanted or appreciated, especially since the
trade-off is increasing complexity. Veteran fiddlers such as myself
fondly look back to the less complicated days of tweaking DOS and
Windows ini settings. I understood what I was doing in those days and
felt like I had much more control over my computing environment.

Casian
 
Casian, that is my single biggest complaint about MS as well. STOP
TRYING TO GUESS WHAT THE HELL I WANT!!!!
 
For future, if you boot into Safe Mode you will see every piece of hardware
you ever installed. It can be scary to go into Safe Mode Device Manager and
go "but I haven't had that video card in years". Go ahead and
remove/uninstall anything you are no longer using.

However, be careful. You may see multiple entries for your hard drive
controllers. Leave them alone. Granted, you are only using (probably) two
entries but, unless one set of entries is for something like a VIA chipset
and you don't have one anymore, you won't know which entries you are/aren't
using and, if you delete the wrong one, your system will hang. You can
reboot and Win2000 will reinstall the drivers, but it is stil a pain.
 
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