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Asks me to install drivers for my harddrives and DVD Burner?!

K

krackato

Golden Member
Everytime I restart my system, Windows says it's detected new hardware. It then brings me to the New Hardware Wizard and tells me to install the drivers for my 2 harddrives and my DVD Burner. If I tell it to go ahead and look for a driver it says it can't find a driver for all 3 of the devices. But all 3 of the devices work fine. In Device Manager the harddrives and optical drives seem perfectly fine. There's no yellow exclamation point.

I then restart the machine and the whole seemingly pointless endeavour starts all over. I've never had a machine ask to install drivers for a harddrive or an optical drive. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

 
QUESTIONS:
- Did this just start happening recently?

- If so what changed? Did you install any new hardware?

- If it just started recently, have you tried rolling the system back to a System Restore save point a week or two prior to the problem occuring?

- Did you change motherboards and keep your old OS install without performing a repair install of Windows? If so, you need to do a repair install (and even if not true, a repair install may be your best option for fixing this). Instructions here: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

WindowsXP will install drivers for new DVDs and HDDs but it should be automatic without prompting. It'll load generic WinXP drivers for these and nothing else is required.

I can only assume you somehow deleted the default Windows INF files and it's looking for them. You MIGHT get lucky and pop a WinXP install CD in your CD drive and direct the hardware wizard to look for drivers on there, but I doubt that will work.

Hope this helps...
 
Everything was fine until I tried to install a 16x NEC DVD burner (ND-3520). I made sure the master and slave settings were correct (set the DVD burner to master on the 2nd IDE port). I restarted and it said "Found New Hardware".

So I tried everything to fix that, but it kept popping it up everytime I restarted. So then I uninstalled the IDE driver because I've done that before and never had a problem.

So then Windows said it had found new hardware for my 2 harddrives, my NEC DVD burner, and both IDE driver slots as well as the IDE controller. Said it couldn't find drivers for anything (my motherboard is a GA-7DX+). After much hunting I was able to download some VIA drivers for my IDE slots and controller but now Windows still wants drivers for my harddrives and my DVD burner.

I could do a system rollback but then I'm pretty sure it's going to want drivers for my NEC DVD burner. Which doesn't make sense.

Thank you for your help, BTW. I appreciate it.
 
I'm certain, now, that you've accidently deleted your generic Windows INF files or the generic Windows driver files. This wasn't a problem until you added the new DVD drive and it couldn't find the INF file for it. When you deleted IDE driver you wound up in the same boat (although chances are that your mobo has it's own IDE drivers - most modern mobos do - have you tried re-installing the mobo drivers?).

A System Restore roll-back MAY work IF you roll it back before the INF files were deleted. Worth a try anyway. You can always go back to the current restore point if it doesn't work.

One final possibility: MAYBE you accidently moved your INF folder (doubtful, since it's a hidden system folder). The folder is located at: \WINDOWS\INF

There should be 1000+ INF files in there. The generic Windows drivers will be dated 12/31/02 and there should be around 700 of them (710 on my system running SP2 here).

If they're missing you MIGHT be able to just copy them from another system BUT you should be certain the other computer is running the same service pack.

Ultimately, however, I think you'll need to do a repair install. That will restore all the INF files and generic drivers, and is the safest route.
 
Well, I finally got my system back up and running. That repair install basically broke my system. Windows would not boot up and it just kept restarting over and over again.

1. If I do a clean install of Windows XP SP2 from the CD, I don't seem to have any of the problems.

2. If I use an Acronis True Image to restore my system to a state where all I've done is install Windows XP and a few programs like photoshop, open office, etc, then it doesn't work.

Thanks guys for your help.
 
Is that an OLD Acronis image or one you made of this new install? If it's an old one I'm going to guess it's an image made pre- SP2 and it's not detecting the DVD because you need newer DVD drivers in SP2.

Let us know so we can make a note of it.

Glad you got it working.
 
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