My agonies with Vista continue. My heart skipped a beat yesterday when my USB backup drive just wouldn't show up in Vista. The error message was "Your USB device has malfunctioned". It worked before! And moreover, another external hard-drive I had attached worked fine. There goes all my backup ...... what do I do?
Lucky for me, I had another Dell laptop at hand. So, I plugged my external backup hard-drive and prayed. Isn't that what Microsoft touts about? - "Plug 'N' Pray!"
Just as expected, my hard-drive worked under my XP Dell but not my Vista Vaio. Seemed like a driver issue to me. But for an external USB HDD why would I need a driver?
Finally (as always), I turn to the friendly neighborhood Google. A quick search revealed that it was a Vista issue. The solution was to delete a file called INFCACHE.1 in C:\Windows\inf. Seems like this file stored the drivers for the USB PnP devices. Delete it and Vista will try to detect these devices all over again.
Once the file was deleted, I started plugging all my USB devices again starting with my external drives first followed by the mouse and then other devices (there's a long list here)
So going back to the original error message, it seemed like it was not the hardware that malfunctioned after all.
Shame on you Microsoft! Stop blaming others for your own software issues!!
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