How do you clear out a USB driver?

[southpaw13]

I use a 1 gig memory stick to move games around.  Except it freezes up on my newest Mame.  I think there was something on the stick that conflicted.  How do I delete any type of driver that it might have installed.  I am using Win 2000.  I want to start from the beginning when Windows is just deciding what you plugged into the USB before it installs a driver.  Any ideas? 

Thanks,
Southpaw

[joewhite73]

Try going to the Device Manager and uninstall the driver there.

[Howard_Casto]

That still wont work...  Unfortunately, unless the driver you installed comes with a special uninstall program, windows still keeps the driver, it just unloads it when you uninstall.  You can install new drivers on top of it, but sometimes even that won't work.  (Like for HID drivers, which are "always on")

I can't give you specifics but first do what the first poster did and uninstall the driver. 

Now go to your "inf" folder in windows.  You'll need to figure out which files in this folder were related to the driver you installed.(hopefully it's obvious by how they are named, if not, you may be screwed)  delete those files and only those files.  Now windows won't "remember" what the device is when you plug it in and will ask you as usual. 

Hope that helps.

[MustardTent]

Before you uninstall the device, first open the "device manager" through the control panel->system icon.  Make sure your device is plugged in at the time.  Look under "universal serial bus controllers", your usb drive should be listed there as something like "USB Mass Storage Device".  Right click on it, and open properties.  Click driver then driver details.  Make note of the file listed.  Now and only now you should uninstall the device.  Next, navigate to the file you made note of earlier and delete it.  HOWEVER, be very careful that this file is not being used by anything else (some other usb drive, or something masquerading as a usb block device.  You can verify that it's not being used now by looking through the other usb devices listed in the device manager and checking to see that the file you want to delete is not in anything's device details file list.

Was that long enough?  (Hope it helps)

[MustardTent]

On second thought, don't delete it, just move it to your desktop or something.  I'm not sure if windows will regenerate the file if you delete it.  If not, you'll have to move it back.  I'm pretty sure that this will work though. 

Let me know how it goes.

[MustardTent]

Okay, so I should really try my directions out before giving bad advice  .  Sorry.  After doing some actual research before opening my big mouth I see that all drives (including usb drives use the disk.inf file.  You can't remove this file as all of your drives use it.

I'm looking into how this can be solved.

[MustardTent]

Okay, I tried this on my work computer (sure the boss would like that), so I know this will work and not hurt the machine.

I am confident that your usb drive uses 2 files called:

usbstor.PNF and usbstor.inf

Uninstall your usb drive through the control panel.  After that is complete and you have removed your usb drive from the machine, delete these two files (located in C:\WINNT\inf).  Now after these files are gone, you may re-insert your drive, which will begin a clean install.

Did that help? 

[MustardTent]

don't delete the pnf file.  just the inf file.