How to Remove all Trace of Old Hardware and Its Driver?

andymanis · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:12

I need to completely remove all trace of a pci device as i suspect its lingering remenants are causing a conflict with another card which causes it to blue screen.

Ive tried searching for the individual driver files and deleting them but when i plug the old card in, in device manager it still knows what type of card it is and its name but it just comes up with the yellow ! as it cant install it properly, probably because i delted some of the river files.

So can someone tell me how i can completely remove all referance to the old device so its is completely clear of it?

V4NT0M · 26 Nov 2009 at 10:46

Well there will probably be some complex way of doing it but I severely doubt latent driver files would cause any problem unless the same driver files are being shared by both devices.

What PCI device is it and what card do you think it is conflicting with and do they share any driver files?

Nanobot · 26 Nov 2009 at 11:33

What OS are you using. I know with XP, I had to look in c:\windows/inf and find the corresponding oemxx.inf and .pnf file. If you search for your device name inside the contents of one of the oemxx.inf files, one of them may match.

chaosophy · 26 Nov 2009 at 11:37

Try...

Open a CMD window
Type set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
Then type devmgmt.msc
In Device Manager chose View, Show hidden devices.

And see if there is a ghosted out device entry for the h/w.
If there is right click and Uninstall it.

Then search for and delete and driver files.
Might also be worth running a reg cleaner or CCleaner to see if there are any remnants of the drivers lying around in the registry,

That environment variable can be added to your system's or user's environment variables to save you having to type it each time you want to use it.

andymanis · 26 Nov 2009 at 14:34

its windows server 2003. The device is a pci serial card.

! was installed but doesnt function properly so removed. A brand new one was bought, a startech one and once you install the drivers and reboot it blue screens until you physically remove the startech card.

I'll try CCcleaner, didnt think to try that