Vista - External USB Hard Drive not working, Vista asking for drivers

I have a 500gb Lacie USB 2.0 External Hard Drive and I am trying to
get it to work with a new Dell Laptop with Windows Vista Ultimate
installed.

Vista recognises the hardware when plugged in. The add new hardware
dialog comes up asking for installation of drivers. The drive works
flawlwessly in XP and has been tested on other Vista Laptop's and
works flawlessly. In these cases the OS does not ask for any drivers.

I have tried the INFCACHE.1 fix. This allowed the hardware to be
listed in Hardware manager as correctly installed and working. I could
access the drive (formated NTFS) and copy/copy from it. However
Vista was still asking for a driver to be installed. I cancelled this
and could still access the drive ok.

Once I unplugged the drive however I was back to square one.
Vista reclassified the drive as other devices and yellow exclamation
mark. On boot up Vista asks for the device driver.

Paul,

Some USB devices may use special drivers to try to get optimum performance
out of the device. I don't know if LaCie is one of these. Many other devices
use the drivers supplied by the O/S and work fine.

I have a Maxtor external drive that will not work with Windows 98. Yet I can
use my 500 gig drive (installed in a case made by Adaptec) on Windows 98
just fine. This is one of the reasons I highly recommend Adaptec products.
They just work!

Check with the drive manufacturer to see if your external drive needs these
special drivers. Then get the Vista drivers you need.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)


"Paul Walker" <noone@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:kfjhf39cckk90pge865mdkqr2oo0h3rm3b@xxxxxx

Lacie like other USB 2.0 External drive manufacturers offer no
drivers, only for Win98 which is understandable.

The drive is detected and works on other vista systems. I have
Vista Ultimate. I am well aware that threre appears to be a lot of
people with the exact same issue. I have worked through the
suggestions but upto now nothing has worked.

Paul,






On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 10:09:55 +0100, Paul Walker <noone@xxxxxx>
wrote:

When it asks for the driver where do you tell it the driver is? Next time
tell it that you want to tell it where the drivers are and enter
C:\Windows\System32\drivers, this has worked for me.
"Paul Walker" <noone@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1scif359m1qloeapale18791gsffmms85o@xxxxxx

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:31:41 -0400, "John Lee Brown"
<johnlbrown53notospam@xxxxxx> wrote:
Just using C:\Windows has worked for alot of people too.

RE :

Point driver installer to either

C:\Windows\System32\drivers

C:\Windows

I will give these a go and report back.

Thanks

Paul.

"Paul Walker" wrote:
I am having the EXACT same problem with the same drive. I tried pointing
Windows to System32\drivers to locate the drivers but it did not find any.
I also have similar problems for a number of USB flash drives. I have 4 in
total, and have only been able to get one of them to work. Even the flash
drives belonging to my colleagues don't get recognized by Vista on my machine.

I too have Vista Ultimate and am experiencing the same issues. Please Help!!

Ali R

This solution has worked for some people with problematic USB devices:

Locate the file INFCACHE.1 in C:\Windows\inf

Right click on the INFCACHE.1 file, select Properties >Security > Edit, and give
your account full control.

Delete INFCACHE.1, or rename it to INFCACHE.1.BAK or temporarily move to your
desktop.

REBOOT

If this works for you, you can delete the INFCACHE.1 file. Windows will not
recreate it.


I Bleed Blue and Gold
GO BEARS!


"Ali R" <Ali R@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6664783D-EEEA-477A-AC96-F24A14DC6653@xxxxxx

I gave this a shot and it didn't work either. Presents the same problem as
before.

any other suggestions? I'm especially confused as to why (according to the
initial post) this would work on SOME Vista machines, but not ALL Vista
machines.

Ali R

"Cal Bear '66" wrote:

Is this of any help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...EN-US%3B937187


I Bleed Blue and Gold
GO BEARS!


"Ali R" <AliR@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:A60DBE0F-8F18-4337-B6B2-41D86139E305@xxxxxx