I have a win2000 driver for a PCI device working now, complete with what
passes for PnP support. (That is, it seems to play nice with the PnP
manager.) However, in trying it out on another machine, I had troubles.
The trouble seemed completely unrelated to the driver. In fact, the PnP
manager seemed to be intentionally ignoring the card, and I do not yet
understand the circumstances that would cause win2k to do that. There must
be a hidden registry entry or data file that controls this, but it made
the driver impossible to install.
This is the setup (long):
The machine had Win2K installed. The board was already in the machine at
the time of the install (it was working fine under NT and Linux at the
time) so there was no driver for it. The person who installed the system
doesn’t remember if the hardware wizard ever was started to ask for a
driver for the device, but if it did, there was no driver so he probably
pressed the buttons needed to make the wizard shut up.
When I tried to install the driver with the Add/Remove Hardware applet
in the control panel, it seemed to correctly install the driver, but did
not bind it to the installed device. In fact, I never saw the device in
the device manager, not even as a generic “Multimedia Device”, before or
after installing the driver.
The DeviceTree program (Thanks, OSR) showed the PCI device was present,
and the pci dumper from Blue Water Systems showed that the card was
detected present and properly configured. The card was there, and Win2K
was clearly aware of it.
None of the device related applets supplied with the O/S showed the device.
No scans for new hardware turned up any mention of the card. We even
removed the card, rebooted, rescanned for hardware, rebooted and reinstalled
the card, and still the search for new hardware failed to turn up the card.
Eventually, we *re-installed Windows 2000* with the card removed. When
we put the card in and booted, the hardware wizard started fine. We pointed
it to the inf, and the driver was installed and bound to the card and it
started working. It worked fine ever since.
I did not have the same trouble with a different machine. I installed the
O/S on my test machine with the card installed, and I got the hardware
wizard just fine. However, I installed the O/S specifically to work on the
driver for this card (and soon many other cards) so I might have spoke
different spells to the wizard.
So who spoke what to the Wizard to be so thoroughly cursed, and how do I
break the curse, short of a Dragon Slave? And just as important, what
spell or crystal ball can I use to peer into the mind of the PnP demon?
Steve Williams “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
xxxxx@icarus.com But I have promises to keep,
xxxxx@picturel.com and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com And lines to code before I sleep.”