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.

Thanks for this article as this clarified a few point for me anyway!

I have found one useful tool when looking at filter issues which is free and can be found here:

http://www.bustrace.com/downloads/free_utilities.htm

The tool is called DEVFILTER.EXE and is a graphical tool to view the filter drivers on your optical devices.

Unfortunately it doesn't help you fix them but it's a good way to narrow down on the problem filter so you can sort it out.

Any thoughts about including something in DAF to help resolve these issues?

Kind Regards

Simon