Now and then I used to come in touch with a PC (a laptop) of a friend of mine. This PC used to display a rather strange behavior. This PC, running Windows 7, would not correctly mount any usb hard disk or pendrive, except for a few new USB 3.0 drives. This Asus laptop had a really convoluted installation history, as even specifying the precise model it is not very easy to uniquely determine the specific driver to install for a given device. It turns out that every re-installation is made is a sort of trial-and-error procedure and the final outcome is, as one can see, not very nice.
No shame for the PC owner, on my opinion. I just believe it stinks to have different hardware choices when it comes to choosing the correct driver. A driver download service using a service tag to correctly determine the driver to install would be best…but as far as I know not all manufacturer site give this opportunity.
Anyway having a laptop that can mount only some pen drives is certainly unnerving…so I decide to tackle this issue. First I had to correctly determine the driver to install. A few device not found went away…he had them using the bluetooth driver downloaded for that specific model and submodel from Asus site, taking special care for the chipset driver and the AsMedia USB 3.0 driver.
But the elusive usb pendrives lingered with the ‘Driver not found error’. It turns out that usbstor.inf was indeed the culprit…as it was not in %systemroot%\inf. So if Windows can’t find your USB devices? Make sure USBSTOR.INF is still there! (thanks ckon).
Restoring them was relatively simple by taking them from one of the %systemroot%\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\usbstor… directories and taking the most up-to date, as mentioned here.
I suppose that afterwards a good run from Device Cleanup Tool from Uwe Sieber can be just useful. As we speak, the PC works just fine. I am just curios on what or who deleted usbstor.inf in the first place…