Cannot add USB or Firewire Devices

[kirkilj]

This was a slight inconvenience for a while, but it's now a major problem for me. I cannot add any new USB or Firewire devices. Old devices that I've used in the past (about a year ago) work just fine. When I try to connect a new device, I'll get the "new hardware detected" message as expected, but will eventually get the "installation failed" message. Further attempts to plug in the device either result in the same error message or nothing happening at all. I initially thought that it was a USB problem until I tried to plug in my digital camera via Firewire and got the same results. Does this point to a PnP problem? I get the same result if I remove the hardware item from the device manager and try again.

It sounds like some data structure has been corrupted somehow or some limit has been reached. I'm at a loss.

Any ideas?

Regards,

John

[Kindovic]

i ever came across this problem...

but unable to solve

[James Hamilton]

I'd retrieve the newest drivers for your chipset/media from your manufacturer's website. It sounds much like a driver issue to me.

[jaclaz]

Check The status of the device.

It may have a status 19 or 24.

Often it is due to some "lower" or "upper" filters installed in the Registry, some "virtual" drive drivers have been reported as being the cause, as well as "proprietary" USB drivers:

http://www.msfn.org/board/USB-storage-devi...er-t121254.html

http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html

(I am assuming that we are talking about devices that are seen as "Mass Storage Devices")

It could as well be a hardware problem, but since I presume that your devices work on other PC's, I doubt it:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Win-XP-Drive-t122391.html

There are possibly limits in the number of devices (entries in the Registry) that you can connect on a given PC, but they should not apply on "normal" use (as an example where this may happen, "public" PC's like that on Universities to which thousands of USB sticks may be connected).

jaclaz

[Kiki Burgh]

Often it is due to some "lower" or "upper" filters installed in the Registry

jaclaz

this is true and my reply may be unrelated but just wanted to share that indeed lower/upper filters messed up my system ... what i thought before to be an easy task of removing lower/upper filters (via regedit) due to "incorrect function: pop-up (about blank discs) caused me not being able to login to my system (both my keyboard and usb mouse didn't work once it got to windows (even in safe mode)) ... after some attempts to get it to work, eventually, it said it couldn't load the profile anymore & created a new profile ... still without any keyboard or usb mouse function ... oh well ...

as for the concern, perhaps you could try to remove all usb drivers and have it auto-detected upon restart ... thanks!