MISSING COM PORTS

[Guest]

I'm running XP SP2 on Compaq Presario Notebook R3210 US, AMD Athlon 3000
Processor. The COM ports listed under device manager/hardware have all
disappeared. Each time I connect a USB device thast requires a COM port, it
gets assigned a higher numerically higher COM port to function...I'm up to
COM 9 when when I last used a GPS receiver with the laptop, even though no
other devices are connected, nor any other porgrams appear to be utilising
COM ports 1-8, which don't show up under device manager either. I downloaded
COMdisable Beta tool (supposed to list available com ports as well as enable
and disable them) lfrom Microsoft website, installed the program, but coudn't
get it to run. It would open up briefly for a couple of seconds, then
spontaneously shut down. I uninstalled and reinstalled this program a couple
of times, but same results. How can I get COMports 1-9 to appear under device
manager again?

 

[James W. Long]

firstoff a com port is not a usb port.
com ports have 9 pins db 9 connector (on laptops) and usb is 4 wire
rectangular.

assuming you have a usb device that emulates a serial port, thats different.

maybe you should try opening a cmd window to run your comdisablebeta tool.
I bet it runs in a cmd (dos) window and by default disables
all ports and thats why you don't see them.

open the window first and run the tool inside the open cmd window
and see if the program requires any arguments, such as which ports
to enable/disable.

thats all I can say from your description of how you run that util,
it acts like a dos util and only briefly runs. this indicates to me
you need to run it from within the window, not by clicking on
it from windows. thats all I have.
James

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I know what a USB port is....my laptop does not
have a serial port and all devices are connected thru the USB ports. COM1
used to show up as an available port in Device manager, when the computer was
new...This problem with the missing ports manifested itself BEFORE I
installed the COMdisable tool. However I will try running the tool in a CMD
window and see what happens.

 

[Guest]

I ran the COMdisable utility in a Command Prompt window successfully, bu it
showed me "NO COM PORTS FOUND" Can I reinstall the COM port file from my XP
recovery disc without a complete OS reinstall?