Sony Memory Stick Driver

[Rick]

I have a Sony VAIO PCG-GR370 laptop. It has a built
in "MagicGate" memory stick slot, which is apparently on
the PCI Bus internally, and should be treated by the
system as a removable hard drive.

The system came with XP Home. I recently realized that
the memory stick slot, which I use rarely, didn't work.
After extensive gyrations with Sony support, I finally
succumbed, and reinstalled the OS from the distribution
image. Works fine. However, when I upgrade to XP Pro,
the device disappears, and an "Unknown Device" appears
under the USB devices.

I am unable to find any drivers on any of the disks that
will correctly reinstall this device, nor on MS or Sony's
web sites. Sony claims the drivers in their Driver
Recovery CD \Drivers\SCSI32\VA32W2.SYS VA32XP.INF should
work, but the Device Manager says they don't "contain
information about my hardware."

Surely I am not the only person who ever tried to install
XP Pro on this sytem.

The knowledge base has not yet proved helpful. Any
insight would be appreciated.

(FWIW, I am a very advanced user, so, with all due
respect, simplistic troubleshooting responses will not be
particularly constructive.)

Thanks,

-Rick

 

[Quaoar]

I have a Sony VAIO PCG-GR370 laptop. It has a built
in "MagicGate" memory stick slot, which is apparently on
the PCI Bus internally, and should be treated by the
system as a removable hard drive.

The system came with XP Home. I recently realized that
the memory stick slot, which I use rarely, didn't work.
After extensive gyrations with Sony support, I finally
succumbed, and reinstalled the OS from the distribution
image. Works fine. However, when I upgrade to XP Pro,
the device disappears, and an "Unknown Device" appears
under the USB devices.

I am unable to find any drivers on any of the disks that
will correctly reinstall this device, nor on MS or Sony's
web sites. Sony claims the drivers in their Driver
Recovery CD \Drivers\SCSI32\VA32W2.SYS VA32XP.INF should
work, but the Device Manager says they don't "contain
information about my hardware."

Surely I am not the only person who ever tried to install
XP Pro on this sytem.

The knowledge base has not yet proved helpful. Any
insight would be appreciated.

(FWIW, I am a very advanced user, so, with all due
respect, simplistic troubleshooting responses will not be
particularly constructive.)

Thanks,

-Rick

You could try the brute force approach and delete the device and see if
XP will detect it.

On my GRV series, the memstick appears as Sony MSC-U03 USB Device under
Disk drives with System32\Drivers\disk.sys and
System32\drivers\PartMgr.sys; and as Sony Memory Stick Reader/Writer
under USB controllers and the driver is system32\drivers\USBSTOR.SYS.
All of these are XPSP1 native drivers.

\inf contains usbstor.inf and usbstor.pnf. usbstor.inf has the device
descriptor for the memstick reader. Can you search your restore disks
for these two files?

Q