How to correct Device Manager hardware errors

Reader Al Rodemann encountered this problem on an older PC, but the same kind of trouble can crop up even on the latest hardware and software. And in fact, the solution works for all Windows versions — even Windows 7!

• "I maintain a Windows 98 SE computer at my golf course and it has a problem I can't solve. I know WIN98SE is ancient, but I wrote two large tournament programs back in the '90s using dBase III Plus, and I need an LPT port to do printouts. These programs are used four days every week.
  
  "I used a hard-disk cloning program to back up the main drive to a slave drive, and this cloning program worked only once. Now, looking at Device Manager, two areas are expanded and show problems. 'Generic IDE Disk Type 01' has a red X through it and, when opened, tells me that 'This device is not working properly because a device it depends on — Primary IDE Controller (Dual FIFO) — has been dynamically disabled.' The hard-disk controller has a yellow exclamation point (!) through it.
  
  "This appeared only after cloning. Everything else works fine, but this problem has me stumped. How do I re-enable it so I can use the cloning program again?"
  

It sounds like your cloning software worked by overriding the normal functions of your hard-drive subsystem, in effect benignly "hijacking" the normal disk operations to make the clone. Something didn't get set back correctly, most likely because the clone software wasn't designed with ancient Windows in mind. In all, I suspect this is just a simple hardware configuration error with no permanent damage to anything.

Fixing that configuration problem is easy, and is the top topic in my current weekly WindowsSecrets.com column.

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* BitTorrent put 100GB of junk files on my PC!
* Internet Explorer 8 causes screen blackout

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