Vista - Hard Drive Drivers

I have been trying to figure out this problem for about 4 days now, and it's driving me crazy! I think I know what caused the error, now it's just a matter of how to fix it.

What caused it? I think CCLeaner is the culprit. I have been using it for months and cleaning my registry with no problems. A week agro, when I used it, I cleaned my registry, and didn't backup up the changes like I should have, and on the next restart, Vista was prompting me to find drivers for hard drive and mp3 player.

I've tried just about everything on these forums:

1. Installing 3 different hot fixes, none of which worked.
2. Deleting Infcache.1 and letting Vista (with the hotfix installed) take care of it.
3. Uninstalling the driver device and doing a reboot.
4. Trying to repair my isntallation, which fails at the very end for some reason.
5. Setting the value of DevicePath in the registry to Windows/System32

So, I've come down to all I have left is to do a clean install, and I would hate to do that since everything works except for those two devices, and Vista has been running solid every since it came out and I bought it.

Here is the screenshot of the error:


Any suggestions would be awesome!

Is there any way you can reinstall the Vista drivers?

Hmm that is very weird. It can't of deleted Hard drive drivers... otherwise you wouldn't be able to start up any programs.

The only way to properly reinstall drivers that come with Vista is to reinstall Vista... unless someone else knows...

Sorry mate.

CCleaner should have a backup of the registry from before they did the cleaning. Try going into CCleaner and using the Restore Point. If not, use the Vista Restore Point from a time before the issue began.

Unfortunately, I did not backup the registry that time I made the change.

Windows Vista has seemed to me like it took a step backwards in the System Restore too. For some reason, when I install ANY updates, it deletes all past restore points. So, right now, I have 1 restore point, which is when it failed to install SP1. It's pretty lame, and I'm pissed that does not work.

I never had anything to complain about in Vista before this, now I have a lot of things to complain about. SP1 doesn't really make it better either .

So, here's something odd. I tried installing SP1 twice, in which it failed both times for some reason. But after the second revert, the drivers for my hard drive started popping up again.

But for everything else, it will now find the drive, but I get the same error of "encountered an error while trying to install the driver." crap.

So, any suggestions there?

Also, I have installed the Hotfix to fix the problem with the Infcache.1 file, but it seems it's not reappearing in the C:\Windows\System32 directory, any ideas?

Thanks for your help.

Try (in an administrator cmd prompt) sfc /scannow

Honestly, I'm not sure.

I tried that already as well. Initially, it did fix some errors, but from there on it just says there are corrupted driver files and it cannot fix them.

Probably a stupid question, but have you tried doing everything in safe mode?

Actually, now that you mention it, I have not. I will try that and get back to you. I'm not sure if running it in safe mode will affect anything, considering all of the system used files will still be the same. But I'll have a go at it.

I started it up in Safe mode, same thing happened.Just talked to my friend about this mishap, and while talking, he made me realize something. I don't think it's actually my drivers that are corrupted, but something in the registry that I deleted/updated to where Windows cannot find them.Any chance you know where the key values are for looking to find drivers?Thanks.

Can't say I do. Those things are pretty tough to deal with. I suspect at this point you'll be stuck with a clean install. Sorry.