Unknown device (hardware question)

[ele5125]

Hi, every time I start my computer a dialoug box opens with the add new hardware wizard telling me it has found a unknown device.

This started hapening since I moved my hard drives around I think. As far as I know all my hardware is plug and play compatible. I have Windows 98 SE. I thought maybe I acedently deleted some drivers, but if that was the case woulent it just give me an error saying a required dll or sys file was not found, or the hardware just would stop working?

All my hardware works

Today I brought new speakers for $5 regular $28.94

but i started geting this message a few days ago.

Any ideas as to what may be causeing this?

in controll pannel>system, there are no question marks to indicate any problems.

[sweet_angel]

I think you should check again..position of your socks...(modem card,RAM..etc) in tour HARD DRIVE after you moving around a bit..it hapenned to me..mmmm just make sure everything already fit in theirs socks

[avdven]

Give some more detail. What exactly does the unknown hardware identify as? It could be anything. Could be some driver that has to do with your sound card, modem, motherboard, etc. Possibilities abound. I'm assuming you're pretty familiar with what's in the system? Check the System under Control Panel (as you said) and see if anything looks like it may be missing. Also, it's possible that, in the process of moving some hardware around, you may have made some BIOS changes, possibly enabling some on-board feature which was previously disabled. The only way to figure out what the problem is would be to back track and figure out exactly what changed in the time that it was working fine and the time that it appeared.

AJ

[darkes]

One other thing I would suggest is to try Start/Settings/Control Pannel/Add new hardware after your PC has booted. Get it to look for all devices and see if it finds anything.
I had an odd problem on my Win98 PC at home, to do with the modem. It works fine with the drivers I am using (recommended by the manafacturer), but Win98 doesn't seem to like them at boot up time! I let Win98 add its own set of default drivers, and then went back and changed the modem options to use my drivers. Curiously this has fixed the problem, as Win98 seems to be happy that it has a copy of its drivers, even though they are not used when the system boots

[faust]

Go to your Device Manager (Right-Click My Computer and then left-click properties. Select the Device Manager tab) See what has a yellow ! this will be the new hardware thats trying to be installed. i.e. it maybe a pci device (modem, sound card etc) or it could be ide controller...

[ele5125]

I had checked the device manager before posting, there was nothing with a yellow question mark Other then the unknown device. Simulary I went to the add/remove harware wizard and did a scan for new hardware, and nothing. As previosly sugested I checked my bios settings to see if I could see anything. I dont have onboard sound or video because it is a old motherbord, (fourm AT) with that big 5 pin din conector at the back for keyboard. All my hardware works, But it could very well be a seting in BIOS as I recently tryed to restor my BIOS settings from a old boot disk, which caused my hard drives to not work, so I manualy changed it back.

But I fixed the problem now because in the device manager I selected properties for the unknown device and checked to disable the profile for this device and now it dont ask at boot anymore.

Once again thank you everyone for your help in resolving this problem. It does not come up at startup now because i disabled that profile in the device manager. For now im satisfied as long as it dont bug me anymore.

10X so much.