Vista usb driver installation issues

Recently, I’ve made a fresh install of Windows Vista on my Dell laptop. My troubles started when I tried to plug in a usb device that I needed to program.

Vista found my device, displayed it’s name in the Device Manager and started to install the driver for it. The installation seemed to go fine when it suddenly finished with an error message :

“Windows encounterd a problem installing the driver software for your device” … “Could not find the file specified.”.

I was astonished… I tried reinstalling the driver several times by manually specifying the path to my driver. I KNEW it was there.

The solution came by inspecting the log file : C:\Windows\inf\setupapi.dev.log. In the last entry I’ve found that Vista was not searching for the driver in the proper location, meaning C:\Windows\system32\drivers, but in a new location that I suspect, comes from a bug in the driver path formation. Vista was expecting the driver files ( .sys ) in C:\Windows\inf\system32\drivers.

So, what was left to do was to copy my .sys file in the folder Vista expects it to be and it all turned out fine. Now my device is installed and ready to use . I need to point out that the expected folder did not exist, so I had to create it myself. As Microsoft so obsessively suggests, “make sure you have administrator privileges for this action”.

You may find another strange location Vista wants your driver to be, so I think a good point to start is by first analysing the setupapi.dev.log file I just mentioned.