Portable USB Harddrive won't install on vista! This one is a challenge!

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

i dunno.. i never ended up getting it working. now another wierd thing happened. My usb keyboard wont work on my vista. If I boot to xp and then back to vista its fine. But after a while it starts asking me for drivers and stops working!!!!!!!!!!!!! F U C K VISTA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Considering that you're the only person having any issues like this, I'd guess Vista isn't the issue here...

Reminds me of the last time I tried using a motherboard with VIA chipset and XP. I had all kinds of weird problems with USB. I finally gave up and sold the two (identical) motherboards and swore never to use a VIA chipset again.

 

[NYR56]

I'm having very similar issues. After I moved my computer and reconnected everything, Vista can't find drivers for the mouse, keyboard, printer, or bluetooth dongle. Considering many of these don't need drivers at all and already worked on this exact computer with Vista, I really don't know what to do. Luckily the keyboard and mouse function but it keeps asking for drivers. It isn't an isolated problem so don't blame the OP for being an idiot.

 

[NYR56]

I finally got around to trying to fix this issue again, and by pointing Vista to the drivers in "\Windows\System32\DriverStore", everything was installed properly. I have Vista installed on my V drive, so perhaps something in the registry changed and it was looking in my C drive.

 

[Looney]

I didn't bother reading the rest of this thread, but it could be the USB drive itself or even the USB cable that's causing the problem. I had a 120GB Western Digital Passport external drive, and thought all mini-USB cables were the same, so used my USB cable for my digital camera. Well, OSX wouldn't recognize it, and in Vista, it failed more than half the times. Often times i would literally need to hold the drive at a certain angle for it to be recognized. And after awhile, it'll fail and i'l hear ticking on the drive. I thought it was a bad drive first, but then found a 2nd drive doing the exact same thing, and this drive was brand new. Once i used the cable that came with the new drive, it was working perfectly. And when i used that cable on my old drive i thought was dead, it worked perfectly, even in OSX which it NEVER did.

I hear this is because some USB ports aren't providing enough power to the drive (the WD site sells USB cables with double connectors to power the drive in systems with low powered USB ports). And I'm assuming my digital camera USB cable was probably limiting the amount of power it could handle.

 

[zig3695]

is your copy of vista WGA authorized, updated, and online ready to check M$'s driver servers automatically before you plug in the drive? bieng the drive is seagate, your mainboard is common, and its just a USB device that tells me its either two things. 1, your external drive or mainboard is defective, or 2, you stole your copy of vista and it cannot look on ms's online update servers for drivers. edit: and i just noticed you say it all works good in xp, so im leaning toward the latter rather then the former.

 

[Barbazu]

Excellent! Thanks for that tip! That fixed the problem with my USB drive immediately. I have Vista Ult. installed right on C:, though, so I'm not sure what the problem is. If you want to hear something really weird, same thing is happening to a WD 120 gig IDE drive I have installed internally! Pointing to the DriverStore directory fixed both....