Vista - usb drives not working

Ok I have vista home premium with service pack 1.

I bought a new external hard drive with usb. western digital my book.

It wouldn't install correct drivers it so I returned it and got a maxtor OneTouch4.

Vista can't install the correct drivers for this either.

Lists it in the device manager as Unknown device with a excamation by it.

If I goto the disk manager i see it as drive 1 with no letter assigned.

When clicking to try to change it I get an error that says to refresh or reboot.

I did both and no change. The disk manager sees the correct size of disk. but I can't assign a drive letter.

In device manger under disks i do have the maxtor drive showing that its installed.
But under unknown devicices there is one listed. And it goes away if I unlug the usb to the drive.

I take the usb drive to xp and it works as soon as i plug it in.

Two different brand store bought externals didn't work.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled the disks and unknown device with no luck.

The little icon in the bottom right that says safely remove hardware when i click it shows the maxtor drive connected.

What am I doing wrong here? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

You have a driver conflict somewhere. You should list your system specs so we can try an help you track it down.

Hi, skillednerd, and welcome to the forums.

Have you considered your security software? You might have an Suite that includes a feature like USB Firewall - or, you might actually have that exact product installed somewhere as well?

Like you I have Vista Home Premium SP1 and just bought a Maxtor OneTouch 4, and have exactly the same problem with not being able to update the driver. In my case disk manager doesn't recognise the drive at all, although it is identified as OneTouch when trying to find the driver. Unfortunately that's as far as it gets.

The following article on the Seagate support site seems relevant
Self-Service.

Unfortunately my INFCACHE.1 is missing so looks like I may need to run a repair.

Does anyone know of an alternative way to obtain the driver online?

To finally get this fixed I had to get help from the free Microsoft Vista support chat. They changed a registry setting and it started to work. But only the Maxtor not any others. So I had to reinstall and then everything worked just fine.