XP asks for USB driver for external HDDs

[orinoco]

First off, apologies if this has been done to death already, I searched - honest I did - but couldn't find an answer.

I've been having some problems with XP asking for drivers to be supplied when attaching some, but not all, USB mass storage devices. I have currently got issues with a generic 2Gb USB stick/MP3 player [based around the SigmaTec 3500 chipset] and a Fujitsu HandyDrive 160Gb external 2.5" device.

I plug them in, XP gives me the balloon to say it's recognised the insertion of <device> then the 'Can I go to Windows Update to find a driver for this?' wizard window pops up. Obviously there are no drivers to be found at Windows update.

However I can still connect my mobile phone [in Data Storage mode] and another generic external hard disk caddy with a 60Gb Western Digital drive in it.

System spec's in the signature, Mobo has latest BIOS and the driver set was recently updated. I did this all through the MSI 'LiveUpdate' utility after the first failure.

Any clues as to what's gone wrong?

[rjs735]

Have you gone to the MFG web site and see if they have xp drivers. It's rare but if xp calls for one then it may be other tahn the default built in to xp.

Are at xp sp2 at least?

[maxidius]

Sometimes I had this problem too, at least in one case, the USB drive works in desktop PC but won't work in laptop PC; or vice versa.

At another time, a USB drive worked well for weeks, but one day, the laptop PC asked for driver, or just plainly said that it can't read it.

My solution then was that, I used a PC which can read it, saved all data, and formatted the USB drive. But, it seems formatting using FAT32 appears to be safer, while using NTFS might give some trouble because other PCs might not be able to read it. Just my thought.

[rjs735]

I forgot to add that if you sucessful use a usb device and unplug it and the next time do not plug it into the same usb socket it may go thru the device install process again. You just may have wait it out when this happens.

[orinoco]

Thanks for the replies, it seems that the problem was actually a little more esoteric.

Whilst trawling the web for clues, and before pasting here I came across the thought that some of the USB driver files were missing. The credit for this discovery lies with another and I apologise to them for not noting the web site or post but;

It turns out that the USBSTOR.INF file was missing from the C:\windows\inf directory. I copy the i386 directory from the Windows install CD to my C drive as part of my standard build routine. So I ran EXPAND to de-compress the file and put it back into the correct directory.

Run the command from a DOS box and modify the paths as necessary.....

expand.exe -r USBSTOR.IN_ c:\windows\inf

No idea why USBSTOR.INF file was missing, unless it was a consiquence of installing SP3...