A friend of mine has a major problem. He has high speed
internet, but his ISP went down during the fires down here,
and has not come back up yet. He has a dial up provider,
but at the moment he cannot connect.

His system (windows 2000) is not recognizing his modem.
This appears to be because his system is not recognizing
any COM ports (when I tried to detect a modem with install
new hardware, none was found, and when I tried to manually
add it, there were no COM ports to associate it to).

I tried going into his BIOS, but there is nothing there
about COM ports. I looked at the device manager, and no
COM ports were listed. I used the hardware wizard to add 2
COM ports, and configured them manually. Now the device
manager says it cannot start them (device manager error 10).

It is an internal modem, and it worked fine 6 months ago
and has not been used since (he got the high speed internet
access). I really think the problem is the COM ports. If
I enter MODE at the command prompt, the COM ports do not
even show up.

One more possibly relevant item is that he had 2985 files
infected with viruses about 2 months ago. I used a recent
version of Norton anti-virus to clean up his disk, and I
think that is when he lost his COM ports, but I did not
notice until after the fires.

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 09:01:08 -0800, Michael wrote:

>One more possibly relevant item is that he had 2985 files
>infected with viruses about 2 months ago. I used a recent
>version of Norton anti-virus to clean up his disk, and I
>think that is when he lost his COM ports, but I did not
>notice until after the fires.

Compact the files, use Partition Magic or similar to create a data partition
in the free space (space not used by files), move (don't just copy) all
must-keep data to it, the reinstall W2K on the boot partition. Keep the data
partition, as it will be useful to protect data in future. You may have to
resize the data partition once or twice as it fills up -- PM makes this easy
and safe.

Or, burn the must-keep files to a CD-R, then reinstall W2K, reformatting C:
when asked if you wish to do so. The data on the CD-R can be accessed
anytime.

HTH

--
Wolf Kirchmeir, Blind River ON Canada
"Nature does not deal in rewards or punishments, but only in consequences."
(Robert Ingersoll)