My father needed a hardware upgrade so we bought some neat stuff and I managed to get everything back up after installing the new hardware. I just got a few bruises when realizing that Windows (in this case 2000 Professional) does not fall back to a generic driver for the mainboard chipset, if the installed driver does not work. That was fixed hooking up the old hardware and removing the chipset driver … took about 15 min …
The rest of the day I tried to reinstall the AVM Fritz!PCI ISDN driver. It would not work … no matter what. And yes, I do know about the quirks of that card. It was not the first time I installed id. My father could live without internet for a week, so I intended to read up about it and fix it.
Over the week I burned every update and FAQ about the card to a CD, so I would not need an online connection.
Here comes the pain: after installing the Windows Servicepack 4 it would not let me install or change drivers … I was lacking the right to do that … wtf? I was logged in as Administrator! Uninstalling SP4 did not bring back that right … reading the logs I figured out that the security policies could not be loaded … great … I had no idea how to fix that … and no, the rescue CD did not help …
Ultimately, I decided to reinstall Win 2000, install the Servicepack and the drivers, in that Order. What can I say … it works … but I died some that day …