Device Manager empty

I'm a field service technician, and have someone's laptop here with me to fix. Its a Toshiba Satellite SA60 with XP Home Edition, only two months old. (P4 HT in a lappy, sweet)

Basically, no devices work. When I try to create a dial-up connection it says "Unavailable - device missing", and the Ethernet and WLAN cards don't work at all.

When I open Device Manager, the list is completely empty, nothing is there at all. Tried to install SP2 on it with no luck, had SP1 originally. The Plug and Play and Network Connections services are all running, but the Event Viewer reports 10 services as failing to load on bootup, all giving the error "A device attached to the system is not functioning." There's no sign of spyware infections and McAfee is up to date.

I'd prefer to fix this myself rather than reformat the thing, it has flat rate internet and I don't have the passwords. Is there anything I can do other than a reinstall? Thanks.


Here's the list of services that failed:

AFD
Fips
IPSec
MPFIREWL
MRxSMB
NetBIOS
NetBT
RasAcd
Rdbss
Tcpip

Dingatron

See if you can create a restore point and then restore from a previous restore point when everything was working? You'll lose data but it may work. Has helped me out a good few times.

Thanks, but I should have added that it doesn't work either, lol. "Restoration Incomplete".

cormy

Have you looked at: This KB Article - might give you what you're looking for. - [Edit] Actually I see you looked into the Plug & Play feature already ... sorry!

Yeah I saw that, as I said though the Plug and Play service is enabled and running.

Certainly one of the stranger problems I've encountered in my 3 years of working in this area.

Jaeger

These people seem to have the same problem