This is the procedure I followed when cleaning up after an ill-behaved 32-bit development tool that apparently wasn't aware that any of its users might possibly be needing a 64-bit OS. (DOH!)

All the warnings and caveats in the post still apply. About the only things that need to be noted for Vista and later are UAC (of course) and to check whether the filter driver is 64-bit if you're on a 64-bit Windows if it exists on the filesystem. (The post indicates that you should proceed if the filter driver does not exist on the filesystem.) Of course, a 32-bit filter will break a 64-bit driver. :) (How to check this is beyond the scope of a blog comment. Especially when the entry was aimed at technicians.)

A quick :) question: what if there are NO entries in the filters? In my case, I have exclaimation marks on two cdroms/dvds, one of which is not even in my computer…and has never been in the machine since a fresh rebuild and intall of XPpro. No matter what I do the OS detects the drive, and reinstalls it. This causes the drive that is actually present to not function. System restores do not fix the problem.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Should I still follow the above information DjLizard?

Both of your tools make the assumption that the device exists in Hardware Manager. If an incorrect and unrelated filter exists, but the driver does not, and the device is not in Hardware Manager (and therefore has no driver), the filter chain is broken, but your tools do not detect this problem.

It would be more helpful if you scanned the registry for filters, and highlighted whether the drivers were present, than scanning the hardware and only loading these drivers to look for filters.

Thanks!

I understood that there are device filter and class filter, and to filter every keyboard you connect, you should use the class filter.

Now, I have a question.
Is there any way to filter ALL USB devices connected to the PC?
Keyboard, mouse, USB memory, music player, just everything?
Do I have to filter ALL classes?

I would appreciate any feedback on this!
thanks!

yuko

The original drivers didn't work in Ghost14 Norton knows about this but only tells you to load new drivers see http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/securityupdates/detail.jsp?fid=security_advisory&pvid=security_advisory&year=2008&suid=20081007_02

I really enjoyed reading your post. I found when I was troubleshooting my external enclosure from Azio (Model# ENC211SU31) paired with my 80GB hard drive. It's being used (when it works) on WinXP Pro SP2 and SP3.

Issue: the drive is recognized only about 1 out of 20 times. Usually when is plugged into the computer for the very first time it works. It usually works the second time. It usually fails the third time and afterwards. It is tricky to make it work after that (I still did not figure out the procedure – some combination of plugging/unplugging, reboots, removing ghost driver, weather, moon phase, tide, etc).

My troubleshooting so far:
1. I checked working drive in device manager. The device is listed there as "Initio MHY2080BH USB device". All appropriate drives seems to be generic WinXP drivers as expected (manufacture states that no drivers are needed when running on XP and later).

2. When device is not recognized, it appears as "Unknown device" in device manager. Note, that correct ghost device is still present. I believe, that the problem is in device ID recognition …
The working device shows meaningful "Device Instance id" (USBSTOR\DISK$Ven_Initio …) and "Hardware id" under device properties/details tab. On the other hand, "Device Instance id=USB\VID ….".

I did reseeded the the drive in the tray with no positive result.

Since the device is not recognized, I cannot delete upper/lover drives …

Note: I did all this testing with ac adapter and connecting only one of the USB plugs.

I would appreciate any feedback on this.

PS> As I keep troubleshooting this I realized, that it perhaps has nothing to do with upper/lower drivers, but rather inability of computer/OS to recognize hardware or failure of Azio enclosure to provide proper ID. Why this is happening I do not know. I still would appreciate your feedback.

With regards,
Radek

It seems that by downloading devfilter.exe (enabling to see your upper/lower driver filters) GEARAspiWDM was spotted as an upper filter with no registery related or utility or whatever you want to call it.

When i found this article (about 3 hours later), ITunes seemed to be the problem.

It turns out that yesterday, my sister uninstalled ITunes from my computer (based on the only restoration point available on it)

I restored it on that date, hoped that, as the acticle says: "it may or may not put back the .sys file" in place.

Took 5 min to resolve the problem. Now, all my drives are shown and with their proper drive letters.

Thank you to whoever posted that article!

On our setup we sometimes force driver installs with DEVCON, but that requires a deviceID. Apparently for a filter driver you can use a "software enumerated device ID", but I don't know what this implies.

The application is to get a G-Sensor filter driver installed to work with the Intel SATA hardware controller driver.

Thanks for any ideas…

Nice article.

I had been having problems with my USB keyboards for several months before I found this.

I kept on having to plug my keyboards into different USB ports at Windows login to get them to work.

I found out from some forum that it was a filter problem so I tried deleting lower/upper filter keys, etc, etc.

That never worked because the system would never let me delete the keys.

But this fix, with moving the .sys file to its correct location finally solved it.

As it turns out, the sys file I needed, npkcusb, ended up in the folder of an MMO I play. Huh. Who knew?

In any case, thanks again for sharing the knowledge =)

i wait for it.

i use it al the time on my day work….

computer repair and problem solving duty.(computer shop)

i love daf it is for now the best there is for problem solving !

thnks in advance and keep up the good work.