HELP! Win7 will not allow me to attach USB storage devices

karlsnooks said:

speedy,

Let's forget all that has been said.

Let's wipe the slate clean.

Let me suggest that you state your problem, objectively, as if it was your first post.

From an old veteran whose first programming experience dates back to 1962.

Hey man, thanks. You got me by a few years :) I gave up the compiler the day Quarterdeck offered me a job in QA. And they are long gone!

Objectively speaking... Windows 7 seems to be having trouble with USB Mass Storage Class drivers. Specifically, "new" USB devices e.g. memory keys, USB hard drives that have never been plugged into my PC before refuse to install. You get the "Installing Drivers" balloon and then it errors out and you get the "sad" sound and it says "No drivers found". Now these are generic devices all using DISK.SYS and PARTMGR.SYS so there really is no "special" driver for these.

Mass storage devices I have been using all along are fine, as are non-storage USB devices. But it would be nice to plug in other things and have them work as well.

So I took several steps including
- deleting the INFCACHE
- messing around with the registry keys that led me to...
- do a repair install
- forcing the drivers myself, which gets me as far as Windows admitting "yes this is a disk, but the driver will not load due to an error." The error code is 10, which is "file not found".

I can add that VMware Workstation 7.1 is on here, and the VMware USB virtual device handler is quite annoying... that being said, three different VMs all running as guests on this host (one W2K8, one Win 7 with BitLocker, and one XP MCE) ALL read the disk fine, even as the host OS cannot. If I disconnect the USB device from the VMware guest (which forces it to connect to host), I get the sad sound again/

I've entertained the notion that it's VMware that is screwing things up... but I can't really lose that, it's crucial to my work. I would like to avoid either nukeing Windows or repair-installing again, because the drivers I'd need to reload are plenty and fickle. What I'd like to do ideally is understand the problem well, so it doesn't repeat (that's my old QA training :))

Everyone in BSOD has been very helpful in the past and present including them figuring out that my old Logitech Webcam was crashing the kernel (that was a doozy) so I am (still) optimistic that someone will have a stroke of genius. :)

I like this forum. although folks like Dell necessitate it, and it shouldn't be that way.

Thanks again
SS

I know in VirtualBox once the VM has control of the USB device the host system can't access it any longer. Are you sure it's not that way with VMWare? Try shutting down your VMs and see if the host can then access your USB drive.

strollin said:

I know in VirtualBox once the VM has control of the USB device the host system can't access it any longer. Are you sure it's not that way with VMWare? Try shutting down your VMs and see if the host can then access your USB drive.

VMware is essentially the same in that regard, yes. A USB device can connect to only one OS at a time, either the host or one of the guests.

I thought about that too but I get the same effect if VMware is totally shut down. So while VMware isn't making things any easier, I don't think it's doing the harm. Not sure about VBox but for VMware you can easily "Disconnect" any USB device from a VM and it will be passed back to the host... and in my case it will simply fail the driver install once again.

That's what leads me back to it being something in the \WINDOWS\INF directory because at the hardware level, the device is working. Even if I look in the BIOS, that drive will show up just fine as a USB storage device (I could even boot it if I wanted to) but as far as Windows 7 is concerned, it's still a "USB2.0 Storage Device" with a yellow triangle next to it in Device Manager, Error Code 10.

It appears as a root device, which tells me Windows does not know it's proper CLSID.

That about sums up where I am at. :)

Good suggestion though, I did monkey around with that quite a bit, as it is a logical place to look.

SS

Speedy,

I've never used VMWare. I do fee that there is some interaction between your VMWare installation and Win 7.

Due to my lack of knowledge and experience with WMWare, I'm going to bow out other than suggest:
EVENTVWR.MSC

This program will overwhelm you with quantity of info collected.

Locating the desired info is not easy.

karlsnooks said:

Speedy,

I've never used VMWare. I do fee that there is some interaction between your VMWare installation and Win 7.

Due to my lack of knowledge and experience with WMWare, I'm going to bow out other than suggest:
EVENTVWR.MSC

This program will overwhelm you with quantity of info collected.

Locating the desired info is not easy.

Yeah... sadly applications these days tend to use Event Viewer as a dumping ground for all kinds of irrelevancies. And Windows gets REAL unhappy if the System log happens to fill up...

I may try vmware uninstall/reinstall just cause that's relatively easy... it's stuff like Adobe CS5 that are a PITA to deal with (which is why I don't want to nuke Windows - once you get CS5 working, messing with it is just asking for agita)

Karl,

Update for ya. FIXED. I did a compare of my \WINDOWS\INF directory with one from a backup, and there were missing files.

Soooo... I pulled the files out of the backup and just overwrote the entire INF directory. PROBLEM SOLVED.

Or... you could spend a couple hours reinstalling Windows ;-)

Seriously, thanks for the help. At the very least we can make a mental note if anyone sees this in the future: it isn't VMware's fault. :)

SS

Speedy,
Many thanks for getting back with the result and solution and I'm glad to hear that the problem was not VMWARE.

Not to start any more trouble here but it seems to me that doing a proper repair installation per petey's advice would have fixed any type of INF problems you were having.

chev65 said:

Not to start any more trouble here but it seems to me that doing a proper repair installation per petey's advice would have fixed any type of INF problems you were having.

And taken up hours of time unnecessarily (almost four hours to do a full DriveImage backup and do a reinstall last time I had to do that). I'm not in a hurry to take my system down for that long.

Anyone with opposable thumbs can reinstall Windows. I know it would work. But that's neither fun nor informative.

-SS