Have you looked at this hotfix??? It solved my problems with Vista
recognizing USB devices and properly installing drivers....


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940199/en-us

--
John

To reply direct, remove the REMOVEME in the signature.


"akita" wrote in message
...
"frj111" wrote:


The following is given with no warrantee what so ever.

I was able to get rid of a crippled partition on one of my SAT drives.

Boot to a windows 98 se floppy disk. Be sure legacy USB is enables in
ROM-BIOS.

Using FDISK try to select the USB drive. If you can see it and it is
an NTFS partition you can remove it by using the delete non-DOS
partition task.

Be careful doing the wrong thing with this tool can turn your system
into a smoking pile of rubble.


--
frj111


Thanks, but perhaps you misunderstood: My issue is with connecting
EXTERNAL
drives, such as USB handy drives or hard disks.

Besides, your idea “might� work under Win 98, on an outside chance perhaps
even under XP (so I doubt it), but it’s not going to do much good under
Vista.

Apart from that, I have no intentions of removing a drive or partition,
but
gaining access to it – in other words I want to make a visible (and
usable)
in Vista’s explorer so that I can read from or write to it. Hence I need
Vista (this is a Vista only issue) to load its default driver so that it
can
recognise the EXTERNAL USB drive.

Thanks for all.

"John Lechmanik" wrote:

Have you looked at this hotfix??? It solved my problems with Vista
recognizing USB devices and properly installing drivers....


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940199/en-us

--
John

Thanks for that, John. But I had tried that one prior to posting here.
Unfortunately it didn't fix my problem.

The odd thing is, as I discovered last night, if I cancel out of the missing
driver dialogues, restart the system with the USB device plugged in, again
cancel out of the attempt to install a driver (as Vista loads), Vista
recognises the USB device perfectly OK. Go figure ...

Also, I've found a batch file to reset all of Vista's services to their
default state, which subsequently made no difference to my USB device issue.
At least I can now rule out any system service issues.

The only other thing I can think of is a recent software change. I did
update Acronis True Image in the past few days. Since that software
introduces software drivers, there could be a chance that the update screwed
up something. Though I never had any problems with Acronis software in the
past ...

I have a previous image backup from a few weeks back and will load that one
in the coming days. Perhaps that will solve my USB device issue ...

Anyway, thanks for all.

"frj111" wrote:


My point (that I did not make very clear) is that I have encountered
problems that Vista by itself simply will not solve. When that happens
often times a tool from an earlier operating system will in fact provide
a solution. I have for years unlocked windows installs to which the
user has forgotten the password. The tool I used was a LINUX boot
floppy.

Good luck

Yes, I see your point.

Meanwhile I have been testing this issue a bit more. Recently I updated
Acronis True Image to its latest incarnation. Since I had made a backup image
prior to installing the new Acronis TI version, I reverted back to that one.
And wouldn’t you know it? Bingo, all is back to as it should be.

So, seems to me that either something went wrong with the Acronis
installation, or perhaps this latest version isn’t as Vista compatible as
Acronis would have us believe.

Shame, really; I do like Acronis True Image and think it’s an excellent
backup solution.

Fortunately one doesn’t need to install the whole program if one has an
Acronis restore boot CD since that does the backup and restore routine
externally (from the OS) just fine. Though one does need to install the
program if exploring previous image backups/archives is a priority.

Thanks to all for the help and advice.

Consider this threat closed.

Have you tried the repair from the Install DVD? Or opening up the Device
Manager and manually removing all the USB devices and then let Windows
re-discover them when you reboot?

Something to consider.....


--
John

To reply direct, remove the REMOVEME in the signature.


"akita" wrote in message
...
"John Lechmanik" wrote:

Have you looked at this hotfix??? It solved my problems with Vista
recognizing USB devices and properly installing drivers....


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940199/en-us

--
John

Thanks for that, John. But I had tried that one prior to posting here.
Unfortunately it didn't fix my problem.

The odd thing is, as I discovered last night, if I cancel out of the
missing
driver dialogues, restart the system with the USB device plugged in, again
cancel out of the attempt to install a driver (as Vista loads), Vista
recognises the USB device perfectly OK. Go figure ...

Also, I've found a batch file to reset all of Vista's services to their
default state, which subsequently made no difference to my USB device
issue.
At least I can now rule out any system service issues.

The only other thing I can think of is a recent software change. I did
update Acronis True Image in the past few days. Since that software
introduces software drivers, there could be a chance that the update
screwed
up something. Though I never had any problems with Acronis software in the
past ...

I have a previous image backup from a few weeks back and will load that
one
in the coming days. Perhaps that will solve my USB device issue ...

Anyway, thanks for all.