Summary

I had difficulties in installing USB flash card readers with Vista.

I had tried products by both Kingston and Belkin :

• Belkin F5U271
  
• Kingston FCR-HS215/1

Each time Windows tried to get a driver online and asked for a CD with a driver. But there was no success.

Eventually I found a solution. To skip to the solution see “Detailed Solution Steps” below.

Problem Research

I sent an email to Kingston and telephoned them in the UK. Amazingly there was prompt help via both routes. However they gave slightly different solutions.

Their most detailed response was…

Thank you for contacting Kingston Technical Support.

Note that Windows Vista does not require any drivers for the DataTraveler.

1. Insert drive and wait for about 20 seconds to see if the driver installation is slow.

2. During device driver search, point to a location Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository and enable “Include subfolders” in the Browse window.

If this fails, point to one of the subfolders within FileRepository:

FileRepository\usbstor.inf_…

FileRepository\disk.inf_…

FileRepository\volume.inf_…

FileRepository\wpdfs.inf_…

3. If FileRepository location(s) doesn’t work, point to location Windows\System32\Spool\Drivers and enable “Include subfolders” in the Browse window.

4. Check Device Manager for incorrectly installed drivers for the DataTraveler; uninstall them and reinsert the drive.

I tried all this and still no success. Each time Vista reported “The system cannot find the file specified”.

After searching the web for a couple of frustrating hours I cam across this entry by WickedMX…

I’ve been experiencing the same problem with usb storage devices for the last few weeks and have visited numerous forums discussing it. After having no joy I decided to take a look around my system folders and have now got these devices working again. While looking around I discovered 2 points of interest:

• In C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository I had two folders named “usbstor.inf” but each one had a different set of numbers attached to the end of the folder name. - could this be where part of the problem lies?
• When I looked in my C:\Windows\inf folder I discovered the usbstor.inf and usb stor.pnf files were missing - this definitely had to be an issue.

Once I discovered these anomalies, I proceeded to copy the pnf and inf files from the most recently updated usbstor.inf folder to C:\Windows\inf. I then went back to the update driver wizard, pointed to the inf folder and what do you know but they all started working again.

So with some scepticism I tried this approach and it worked.

Detailed Solution Steps

1. Go to C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository

Find files named usbstore…

2. Choose the most recent usbstor folder

Open the folder

You’ll see a number of files…

3. Select and copy usbstor.inf

4. Now go to C:\Windows\Inf

Paste the usbstor.inf file into this folder (On my system there was no usbstor.inf file already in this folder).

5. Now try again to install the reader

When Vista reports it cannot find a driver direct it to C:\Windows\Inf

If all goes well you will see the following information from Vista

Footnote

I don’t know whether this approach works with other types of USB device on Vista or other card readers but it certainly worked for me.