Win 2K and device problems

[systempat]

My wife's son brought me his PC which has problems. It's a DELL desktop running Win 2000 pro. He has had problems with a lot of settings getting messed up on it that we both think is a virus. The problem is, it has messed up the drivers for the CD drives. [machine has a CD-rom and a CD-RW]. It won't recognize them even in Safe mode. They come up with yellow marks in the device manager and the properties says the drivers are invalid.
Also every time it boots, even in safe mode it goes thru add-new-hardware dialogs for 'PCI device' and 'PCI simple communications' device. Without being able to use the Win2K disk, I'm stuck. I was hoping to install anti-virus to his system and get it going again.
I have a Win98 start floppy disk. After starting with that I could read the CD-rom. But his C drive is NTFS and the Win98 startup could not handle that.
Would setting the boot drive to the CD-rom and starting with the Win 2K disk get me anywhere?

[bailey]

sounds like the drivers are courpt or the wrong drivers, try reinstalling the correct drivers, you may also need some drivers for the motherboard hardware, is the computer a full factory built unit, or has it been modified at some time.

[andyms18a]

try this link http://support.microsoft.com/default...roduct=win2000

[systempat]

I believe all the hardware is the original build. Unlike me, he's not the type to open up the case and install things. It all looks like Dell gear too. System is about 2 years old and out of warranty.
As to drivers, it's apparent that the ones on the hard drive are not good. And with no CD drive functioning, can't load anything. I was surprised that Safe mode did not help, my Win98 experience is that drivers are not loaded and things run in Compatability mode, which means slower but it works. Is Win2K different on this?
At one point I tried a Win98 start disk that I had, which will boot and load a CD driver. At that point I had access to the CD. I wanted to load the Win2k CD to a folder on the C drive so I could point to the driver files there. But the problem was that the C drive is NTFS and the Win98 start could not do that.

[andyms18a]

have you tryed the fix on the link i posted ? you shod all so find your win2k cd is bootabble if you set first boot device in the bios to cd then boot from the 2k cd you can try a repair install

[systempat]

I'm going to try the boot from the CD for Win2k and do a repair.
That link you sent me looked interesting for the registry edits. I'm reluctant to hook the machine to the Internet in its current state (probably infected) and am definitely NOT going to allow a network connection between it and my other 2 PCs. If I hook it up to the router it will be after I disconnect then.

[systempat]

The PC is back in action and back to the owner. After booting from the Windows CD, tried the Repair installation. That did not take care of it. Then did a fresh install of Win2000 Pro. That fixed the device problem. I then updated a couple of device drivers and installed Antivirus 7. After updating the virus definitions to current, did a full scan and found 2 viruses and it cleaned them.