Redundant Devices in Hardware Manager

[Tom Pizarro]

I tried to dock my Dell Latitude C610 laptop into a new
docking station /port replicator today. It is running
Win2k. I have done this several times with other port
replicators with no issue. However, today it rebooted
several times while docked without ever completing a
successful boot.

I guessed that the issue was lack of appropriate hardware
drivers, etc. so I powered down the laptop and attempted
to boot it undocked. It continued to exhibit the behavior
of rebooting on its own without actually successfully
booting.

I booted in safe mode and checked the hardware manager
where I found multiple copies (3 or 4) of network
adapters from the port replicator - along with
deterministic network enhancer, etc. for each. Windows
2000 would not let me remove the erroneous/redundant
devices/adapters claiming the device(s) may be necessary
for bootup - which is obviously a lie since the actual
hardware belongs to the docking station and not my
laptop. I was able to disable the extra hardware so that
my laptop would boot in normal mode but I have been unable
to make my laptop's actual network hardware work properly
since.

Is there a way to force Windows 2000 to let me remove the
hardware I know is not installed ?

 

[Tom Pizarro]

OK. since posting the original reply I have had some
success in getting the extra hardware off of my machine.
I had tried "scan for hardware changes" in hopes than
Win2k would recognize the missing hardware and uninstall
it automatically. That didn't work. So, out of
desperation, I tried enabling the disabled devices -
starting with the highest replicated version (in some
cases for the miniport I had as many as 18 replicated
devices!!!). To my surprise the attempt to enable the
missing device made Win2K remove the device. I continued
down the chain until all unwanted devices were removed
(via "enable device")

I am still very interested to find out if anyone knows of
a more direct way to handle this situation.