Unknown Device

Well, if you give us a bit more detail, like which notebook you have, the components installed, the OS, what you did that caused this Other Device to appear (most likely Dell didn't ship it that way so did you reinstall the OS, add hardware, etc?) then perhaps we can id the culprit.

It is a driver issue.

Test your video, sound, network (if you purchased it as part of your notebook) and modem (if you purchased it as part of your notebook) within Windows and whichever is not working, then you need to update the driver for that device.

Are there any new hardware components such as pcmcia card that you have recently added to your notebook? Do they have the right drivers for them?

It can also be a interrupt conflict issue which is very rare.

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Inspiron 4100
PIII-866M, 384Mb RAM
16Mb Radeon XGA
20Gb Hitachi HDD
10Gb IBM External PCMCIA HDD
Windows XP Pro
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The IR device sometimes conflicts with other devices, especially if you are loaded with modems and network cards. If you don't use the IR, turn it off in the CMOS. If you do, you may have to disable something else to get it to work. From past experience, I would try disabling the modem first as a test.

Hi Mike,

Thank you for the reply.  I will disable the device...

Today I had the blue screen appear stating: A device driver attempting to corrupt system has been caught.  The fault driver currently on the kernel stack must be replaced with a working version?

Disable BIOS Memory options such as caching or shadowing? 

-- Do I disable the BIOS Memory option in the control panel (system-devices)?  I would not know where to begin in checking a kernel stack and or how to replace with a working version. 

My drives have now changed.  The USB ports indicate as a disk instead of a memory-stick and the IEEE 1394 port is not known at all.  Somehow I need to know how to format.  How do I format the C:/ D:/ F:/ and other ports?

Please I am at a complete ? here.

Thank you!

This sounds like a more serious problem than just an IRQ conflict. If you don't know which driver was causing the corruption, you may be in for a long haul here. First thing I would do would be to back up the system, at least your data files, so that if the worst comes and you have to reformat the drive and reinstall Windoze, your data will be preserved.

You may have a virus at work here. You might want to run a virus scan of your system before doing anything else.

Another thing you could try is to boot to safe mode and uninstall all of the offending devices (don't uninstall your hard drive though). Then boot back to Windows normally and see if it picks up the proper drivers as it finds the hardware again.

I'm not sure I know what you mean about reformatting the C:\, D:\, F:\ and other ports. If you are talking about hard drives here, formatting is the last thing you want to do before reinstalling Windows from scratch. You want to avoid doing that if possible. I also don't know the configuration of your system so I don't know what D: and F: are on your system. On mine, those are partitions on the hard drive. If you format c:, you will lose your system and won't be able to proceed any further except to boot to the restore CD or a Windows CD for a reinstallation.

Before proceeding to that, I would try restoring from a previously saved restore point. If you have one from before the original problem occurred, you might want to try that and see if that solves the problem. If not, you could try booting from the Windows CD and having it repair your installation. If you do that, you may have to reinstall some drivers and you will probably have to run Windows Update a couple of times to get your system back to current status.

All else failing, you might have to reinstall Windows. That will require that you also reinstall all software and Dell drivers.

Hopefully, this is just a minor corruption of part of the registry and removing and reinstalling the devices will fix it.