Empty Device Manager

[Rutiger]

I am running Win98SE. The system has been extensively and exhaustively scanned for spyware, malware, viruses and nothing was found. Hardware was checked, thorough Scandisk came back with no disc issues. No other hardware issues, conflicts, problems.

When I boot up, it stops with some miscellaneous error messages which relate to it being unable to find video drivers which are referred to in the registry and it can't find some of my start up program references. These aren't really an issue for me however.

What is a problem is that the Device Manager is almost empty. It shows no hard drives, no floppies, no video or sound card, etc.

However, if I boot into Safe Mode, the Device Manager window is completely and correctly populated.

I have started the system with an alternate 98SE hard drive (slave drive on the system) and then everything works fine, but of course I don't have proper access to my installed programs on the original Drive C.

I could copy most things more or less over, a lot of programs I will end up losing if I did this however.
I do want to know what causes this and how can it be corrected?

I tried booting to a command prompt, ran scanreg /fix. It came back that the registry had an error in it but it was unable to repair it due to lack of HD space in the Windows directory. There is almost a gig free. That was interesting.

I then tried scanreg /restore. It said it did a restore to a previous version and that it was now repaired. Booting up, of course I end up exactly as original and I know for a fact this reg backup was well before any issues occurred.

I am positive it is a registry issue, but what would cause it and how do you correct it? Other than wiping and reinstalling? Trying a Win98 "repair" install did nothing at all.

I installed no new programs or any system changes, this just out of the blue happened, I booted up one day and bang, it is screwed up, no prior warnings, unusual behavior, error messages, etc.

The XP forums are rife with this same issue but what corrects it for them in most cases doesn't apply to Win98. I have exhaustively tried all of their fixes (at least the ones which can be done to 98SE). You can't set permissions in the 98 registry for example or some of the other things they suggested.

Also if I try to run any program in the Win98 which has the blank device manager, I get an error: 'failed assertion in AxPipe.h. at line347. Error code -2146893818'. Unable to find anything of value for this error code, but I think it is probably related to being unable to access anything related to the system hardware when I am in this type of bootup.

Any concrete suggestions are welcome.

[Rutiger]

I apologize for a double post but the forums are not allowing me to edit my post to add on some other info, for some reason.

I can access the regedit tool and can view the entire registry. It doesn't appear to be loaded with any major (easily noticeable) corruption, invalid entries, etc. Which makes it even more frustrating.

The fact that I can view the entire Device Manager while in Safe Mode yet in "Regular" Bootup (which is basically safe mode now, as no drivers are being loaded), the Device Manager window is essentially empty, shows me that the registry is still reasonably intact, otherwise both bootup modes should show nothing, unless I am missing something here?

Thank you.

[sanmiguel]

try to reinstall your OS when reinstalling it you dont need to format your drive C it will overwrite your old windows 98OS

[Rutiger]

I tried the reinstall "fix" way back when already, in the small hope it would do something, made absolutely no difference at all.

Using regscan /fix or regscan /restore from a command prompt also made no change to the registry to allow everything to come back. In some cases I even got a message that the system was unable to write to the registry, as if it was locked. This is one ridiculously screwed up situation.