Remove Broken Driver

[YueHong]

Hi,

Recently I tried to plug-in an USB extension hardware into my PC, during the installation of the driver, electricity drop. Therefore the installation is corrupted. But, when I tried later on, the windows 7 always load the corrupted installed driver. Therefore, the device is not working. I have tried to uninstall the device at device manager, but when I plug the device in, windows still load back the corrupted driver. How can I totally remove the corrupted driver from the computer?

Thanks.

 

[Blain]

Have you tried to update the driver with the current version?

 

[sm625]

First you need a good search tool, like agent ransack. http://mythicsoft.com/page.aspx?type=agentransack&page=home

Once you have a good search tool, search your entire C : \ WINDOWS folder for all files that contain:

oem*.inf

Organize the results by date. Starting with the most recent, open each file and read through it. These are just text files and can be read in a wordpad or notepad. Usually the comments right at the top of the file will tell you what it is.

Once you find the right file, cut and paste it into a safe temporary location, such as C : \ temp. You can delete it later when everything is working. Now you need to find the matching PNF file. Say you just cut and pasted a file called "oem43.INF", well now you need to search for "oem43.PNF" and move that to the c:temp folder also. Once these files are moved, reboot and install your hardware.

Dont stop after just one set. Search for "oem*.pnf" and look at the dates. That will tell you when they were installed.

 

[mfenn]

I like Blain's answer better. Just go into the device manager, choose update driver and give it the correct driver.

 

[krose]

When you uninstalled the device using device manager, did you check "delete the driver software for this device"? That should remove the faulty driver from the system so it won't load it again.