XP unable to find drivers for new hardware

[CrAy-Z]

Firstly, apologies for the test post... i am having trouble with my
newsreader...

i have aquired a box running xp home sp2 that has a weird issue.
Xp cannot automatically find any drivers for new devices, this includes
keyboards/mice/hdd's/thumbdrives/optical disks. These are all items that
normally have 'in the box' drivers included with xp anyway.

If i point xp to '%systemroot%\inf' it finds the correct drivers and
installs with no issue, however i need to do this at least twice during the
installation process.

I have had a hunt around and from what i can gather windows isn't looking at
it's 'in the box' drivers when new hardware is connected as would normally
happen, however the reason for this currently escapes me. I cannot find
anything disabled services on the system to explain it.

Hope someone has an idea as i am sure this is a simple problem, but i cannot
seem to fix it. Would like to avoid a re-install at this stage. The fault
occured while the system was still runing xpsp1 and a subsequent upgrade to
sp2 did nothing to correct the issue.

Many thanks in advance

Nick

 

[CrAy-Z]

and apologies for the multi-post.... every time i have posted before now i
get an error and after waiting a couple of minutes nothing showed up in
here..... if there are any mod's that can delete my multiposts then it is
muchly appreciated....

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

Firstly, apologies for the test post... i am having trouble with my
newsreader...

i have aquired a box running xp home sp2 that has a weird issue.
Xp cannot automatically find any drivers for new devices, this includes
keyboards/mice/hdd's/thumbdrives/optical disks. These are all items that
normally have 'in the box' drivers included with xp anyway.

If i point xp to '%systemroot%\inf' it finds the correct drivers and
installs with no issue, however i need to do this at least twice during
the installation process.

I have had a hunt around and from what i can gather windows isn't looking
at it's 'in the box' drivers when new hardware is connected as would
normally happen, however the reason for this currently escapes me. I
cannot find anything disabled services on the system to explain it.

Hope someone has an idea as i am sure this is a simple problem, but i
cannot seem to fix it. Would like to avoid a re-install at this stage.
The fault occured while the system was still runing xpsp1 and a subsequent
upgrade to sp2 did nothing to correct the issue.

Many thanks in advance

Nick

You should check your path statement to do this:
just right click on the my computer icon
click properties
click advanced tab and at the bottom of it you will find environment
variables

For a full explanation go to
www.vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/environment.htm

 

[Uwe Sieber]

Sounds like this (issue 2):
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html#xp_asks_for_drivers


Uwe

 

[antioch]

Firstly, apologies for the test post... i am having trouble with my
newsreader...

Your problems seem to be when you use that archaic, cranky web interface
discussion group - stick with newsreader.
If you want to test again go below

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.test.here

Antioch

 

[CrAy-Z]

Cheers, not sure why but newsreader is not reliably posting here, despite nil
error messages... have got it worked out now.

 

[CrAy-Z]

Thanks for the quick reply, i agree that it sounds like point 2. Once i can
get a chance i will give it a test and post back if the problem is fixed.

Cheers