First off, this computer is not mine, it's a customer's system. Having said that...
The hard drive was moved to a new motherboard, CPU, RAM combo, and booted up fine. Customer puts in driver CD, drivers won't load. He brings it into me.
Under Device Manager for Windows 7 x64, I see lots of PCI to PCI bridge, one SMBus Controller, and about 20 Unknown Devices. Greeeeeat... So I start with the SMBus driver directly from the Asus website for the motherboard (P8H77-M Pro). If I install from the setup program, it tells me to reboot, then it starts the install. It gets half way through the setup, then fails (An unknown error occurred. Setup will exit
). When I try to point to the folder from Device Manager, it starts copying files for the driver, even presents me with the proper name of the device, but says that an error has occurred there as well: The directory name is invalid
.
Doing some Googling, I saw that many people had this issue with Vista. K, Vista and 7 are similar, maybe the solutions are the same... But they aren't.
I tried:
- Copying the entire driver folder and setup utility to the
Program Files
folder and running it / selecting it in DM - Downloading another set of drivers in case this one is corrupt
- Disabling UAC
- Deleting and recreating the
%WINDIR%\TEMP
folder - Removing all references to previous hardware that I could find, even in Device Manager's hidden mode
- Creating a new Admin user
So far, nothing has worked. A wipe and reload will be out of the question.
EDIT I am going to try a repair install and see if that works
EDIT 2 It looks like the hard drive has errors... Imaging to a new drive then testing
EDIT 3 Hard drive is fine. Customer has decided that I know what I'm talking about when I say he needs to wipe and reload. Thanks for all the help, but since this is currently unsolvable in its current form, I'm voting to close as too localized. I will not take offense if others follow along
what
directory name it thinks is invalid. You might use resmon or processexplorer (ms website) or process monitor (ms website). If this occurs after forced system reboot, the latter 2 you might need to run automatically after reboot by placing a shortcut in the startup section.