Solved Plug & Play Peripherals not installing drivers

[Zikon]

I made this thread yesterday about my Xbox 360 controller not working: http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/332975-wired-xbox-360-controller-driver-problems.html I thought that was my only problem, but it's now apparant that my windows will no longer allow me to use any plug & play devices other than what I already have installed (my mouse, keyboard, webcam etc.). Any new peripheral I have that I connect that would have worked in the past within seconds now has its driver searched for only to come up with the driver not being able to be installed or even recognised at all.

UPDATE: I've been googling the hell out of this for 3 days now, by chance I found an article for Windows Vista dated from 2008, seems all I had to do was direct the driver install to "C:\windows\winsxs" and bang! Problem sorted, all my USB peripherals auto install quickly again.

 

[andrew129260]

Try this:

USB drive or flash problems? How to cleanup and remove old USB storage drivers - TechSpot Forums


That should resolve any issues you have with usb devices unless it is hardware related.

EDIT: Make sure to run this bat file as an admin. Right click the bat file, run as administrator. Code used for the bat is on the website, and verified by me as being the same when editing the bat file.


Nevermind, saw you resolved it.

 

[AsokAsus]

Had exact same problem, with exact same symptoms

Zikon,

I know this is an old post, but it shows up at the top of google searches for this problem so I wanted to post my solution for others facing this problem.

I had this exact same problem with the exact same symptoms, extending to ALL devices not just USB. The problem turned out to be that I had installed a half-arsed program that incorrectly modified the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath, which normally defaults to "%SystemRoot%\inf". they tried to add their own directory to the path, but the fools rewrote the key as REG_SZ instead of REG_EXPAND_SZ, which is necessary whenever the string contains an environmental variable.

Every time installation of a new device was attempted, the following error would appear in C:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log

dvi: Enumerating INFs from path list '%SystemRoot%\inf'
inf: The path %SystemRoot%\inf\*.* is missing!


Consequently, NO device would plug an play, including any system devices one might uninstall to try and force a fresh install. Not knowing about the above bug, when I updated several drivers, my system blue screened because several system devices "disappeared", including the system drive.

Once I used the system recovery tool to install a restore point prior to the attempted driver upgrades and then figured out the problem, I deleted the old DevicePath key an made a new one with the correct data type and that fixed everything. (While I was at it, I set the DevicePath back to the default value and uninstalled the offending program.)