xp can't install flash drive opens hardware wizard

Bought a new flash drive, took it to work, and dumped some files on it. Worked perfectly. Took it home to my Dell Latitude laptop and plugged it into my powered USB hub. "Found new hardware" balloon popped up, followed by the "Found New Hardware" wizard. (The external hard drive I have hooked to the hub works fine.)

It wanted to know where the drivers are for the flash drive. Of course, this is supposed to be plug and play. I tried various options in the wizard...pointed it to windows\inf, let it look on my xp cd, search the net, etc. No love.

Does not show up in disk management but does show up in device manager with yellow ? and !. Right clicking there just led me back to the wizard.

Tried disconnecting the hub and plugging the flash drive into both usb ports.

Tried a few solutions google led me to...no love. (I'm at my office now...if you want to know what I tried I can reply later.)

Had the exact same problem with an external hard drive I recently bought, though Western Digital's tech support was a little lame and decided that the drive was bad and had me return it.

I'm definitely not a major geek and am in over my head here. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Hi electoman, what make model is the external?


Q

 

Can you test the flash drive on another computer?

Do you have any other USB devices you can test on the laptop? Can you borrow another flash drive from a friend?

 

As mentioned, the flash drive worked perfectly on my office machine.

I currently have an external hard drive hooked up, and it works fine.

I have tried two brand new plug/play drives....the flash drive and a WD external hard drive....same result.

 

The flash drive is a Patriot XT 8 gig.

For what it's worth, I went into device manager and looked at the properties of all the entries under USB controllers. They all pointed to C:\windows\system32\drivers as the location. When i tried to point the hardware wizard at that location, I got a message saying there are no device information files there, even though I can see many of them in the folder.

 

What OS and Service pack are you using?

 

what are you current drive letters being used, and what drive letter did the external come up with if any at all?

One thing to try and it may or may not help...

go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Here's a link i found referring to the above location for mounted devices in the registry. It notes how to resolve drive letter conflicts

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...remove-conflict-usb-or-firewire-drive-letter/

 

I'm using XP SP3

 

Thanks for the reply. I don't think this is the problem, though, as the flash drive only shows up in device manager. No drive letter assigned and it does not show up in Safely Remove Hardware. Also, autoplay does run.

 

Hey electro.

Go to the dell support site and check you have all the latest drivers.

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=ca&l=en&s=gen&~ck=anavml

 

Thanks for the suggestion. Went there and ran diagnostics and got a bunch of errors they tell me are related to the hard drive. I NEVER buy extended warranties, but I did in this case, so they are shipping me a new hard drive. I guess their theory is that the corrupted areas on the drive are causing the problem. We'll see.

Thanks for your help....hope I don't have to come back for this problem.

 

Eh? what scan?

Did you check the drivers on the page i linked to? they are free to anybody.

Q

 

Sorry to be so vague. I went to the Dell site and updated the drivers for the chipset and the BIOS. No luck. The next step they suggested was running Dell diagnostics, which you do by hitting F12 as the computer boots up.

The diagnostics caused the computer to light up like an Xmas tree with errors and eventually the diagnostics froze/couldn't continue. I dutifully wrote down the various error messages, called Dell, got a real person, and, thanks to my extended warranty, (which I never buy) discovered that my hard drive was going bad.

They promptly offered me a new hard drive, which I graciously accepted.

Just for fun, I decided to run CHKDSK. It ran for a couple of hours before I left for work. When I got home, it was done and the computer and re-booted.

Plugged the flash drive in and it worked perfectly.

Wondering what had been wrong, I managed to find the CHKDSK log to see exactly what had been found and sure enough, a bunch of .inf files had been corrupted but restored by CHKDSK.

So, bottom line appears to be corrupted sectors on the hd.

Haven't had a chance yet to re-run Dell diagnostics...or to decide what to do with my new hard drive.

Thanks again for the suggestion to visit the Dell site...that's what eventually led me to the solution.

 

Personally I would buy an external hard drive caddy (2.5" size), put the old disk into there, put the new drive in the laptop, get a trial version of something like Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost, copy the old hard drive to the new one, then format the old drive and use it as an external hard drive until it dies completely.

A program capable of cloning hard drives (there are freeware versions rather than trials) is necessary to clone the hard drives. This cannot be done in Windows as the cloning program should clone critical Windows files as well as the boot sector of the hard drive.

 

That sounds like a good plan to me, my bold is likely imminent!

Anyhoo, Glad your sorted mate



Q

 

u mentioned that when u inserted the flash drive in the new hardware screen came up and stated new hardware found, may sound weird but with the flash drive mounted did you double click on ( my computer) to see if the additional removable drives are listed.