My Windows XP Pro can't find drivers automatically - what gives?

August 31, 2004 1:50 PM

Brokenwindowsfilter - My XP Pro SP2 box no longer automatically installs hardware. Yesterday I plugged in a plain old USB mouse and the hardware wizard came up, but after doing its thing it said that it couldn't find the driver. I had to tell it to manually look in places like windows\infs\ and windows\system32\drivers to find the files. Anything I can do to get it working again without doing a re-install? (The same thing happened with a USB keyboard when I tried it.)
posted by Space Coyote to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Can you get it to find the files on your Windows CD?
posted by reklaw at 1:57 PM on August 31, 2004

Not without specifying the exact location. The appropriate drivers were sitting right there already, but for some reason Windows doesn't know where to look for them anymore.
posted by Space Coyote at 2:16 PM on August 31, 2004

I am not that familiar with SP2 yet...actually, at work we are still testing it outside of production, but...

Are you comfortable in the registry at all? Usually, Windows keeps track of its driver paths in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currrent Version\Setup key. There is both the driver cache key and the installation source key. My driver cache key currently says:
%systemroot%\Driver Cache
and the installation is has two entries:
D:\ and D:\drivers\lan
(the second of which is one I sent it to.)

Maybe your registry entries are messed up. Now, standard disclaimers apply for mucking about in the registry. Again, SP2 might be different as well.

I am really not sure if that helped at all...
posted by Richat at 6:01 PM on August 31, 2004

Depending on your hardware setup (motherboard, bios version, etc.) you might want to check your "Plug and Play Aware OS" setting in your BIOS. More information can be found from Microsoft's documentation.
posted by travis vocino at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2004

Thanks for that, Richat.. everything there seems to match up with what you have..

More weirdness.. I unplugged the mouse and plugged it into a hub and had to go searching for the driver file yet again, and when I am in my networking properties screen and click on 'add' and choose either 'protocol', 'client' or 'service' I get an error saying there are no items available (where there should be stuff like QoS, etc.)
posted by Space Coyote at 8:43 PM on August 31, 2004