I have an old IBM Thinkpad 390 laptop (it has a Swiss German/French keyboard). When I install Win98SE (plain vanilla, no patches, no service packs) the process goes smoothly enough but at the end of it Device Manager includes an unknown device.

I can remove this item from Device Manager (just click Remove and it's gone) but as soon I reboot, Windows says it's found new hardware, which it fails to identify so it offers me the chance to install a driver but how am I supposed to know which bit of hardware is triggering this?

Any suggestions gratefully received...

stuck

Try to find complete hardware specifications of your notebook. read the list of all hardware devices, and read devices in your device manager. You will find a difference and that shall be your unknown device.

Also try "unknown device identifier" software, but it may not be 100% true.

Also try looking around here (link).

Try Everest

Thanks for the pointers.
1) I've downloaded a copy of UnknownDeviceIdentifier.
2) I knew about the page at Lenovo Support and I think I've already got everything off that site but I will recheck. The stuff there is helpful for configuring the video and sound correctly on the laptop but it didn't make the unknown device issue go away.

It may take me a few days before I can find some spare time to tinker with this again so I might not be able to report back any success/failure until early next week.

Thanks again,

stuck

Success and much sooner than I expected!

I spent my lunch time trawling the Lenovo site and eventually found a page showing wht the default Device Manager listing should be. Took a print out home and easily worked out that the UD related to the Neomagic audio.

About two mins later all was well.

Thanks again for the hints

(un)stuck