A very strange USB problem.

joeandmarg0 said:

To help me improve my reading skills,would you highlight the relevant Post and paragraph which positively shows how you successfully determined the cause as being hardware or software related ?

What I do have is an old clone of the system drive on a hard drive. So sloooowwwww compared to the SSD despite being a really fast drive.

But booted to that I was able to connect the Kobo ereader and its internal storage showed up as a drive accessible in Explorer.

It's on the same PC. All the same hardware. OLDER INSTALL OF WINDOWS 10 works perfectly. But sometime since that clone was made, something has happened which has fouled up *something* which is only affecting *some* devices and *some* apps.

It's a very difficult kind of software problem to figure out when most devices of a class, IE USB mass storage or MTP, and apps that access them work perfectly fine, but a few don't.

It should be either they all work or they all don't work.

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garlin said:

Report all of the 3rd-party drivers, by running this command as Administrator:

Code:

powershell "Get-WindowsDriver -Online | Sort-Object ClassName,ProviderName | Format-Table @{l='Provider';e={$_.ProviderName}},@{l='Class';e={$_.ClassName}},@{l='Filename';e={(($_.OriginalFileName) -split '\\')[-1]}},Version,@{l='Date';e={($_.Date).ToString('yyyy-mm-dd')}}"

Compare the list between the two PC's/images, and see if the working example has drivers the other doesn't.

List from the current, problematic, Win 10 on this PC USB drivers on current Win 10 install - Pastebin.com

List from the old, no problems, backup clone of Win 10 on this PC USB drivers on the old Win10 that works - Pastebin.com

After comparing the two driver lists (with some parsing magic, since PasteBin truncated the back of the longest lines), and eliminating drivers that didn't make sense, one obvious driver sticks out on the working PC:

Google, Inc., AndroidUsbDeviceClass, android_winusb.inf, 11.0.0.0, 2014-00-28
https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb

garlin said:

After comparing the two driver lists (with some parsing magic, since PasteBin truncated the back of the longest lines), and eliminating drivers that didn't make sense, one obvious driver sticks out on the working PC:

Google, Inc., AndroidUsbDeviceClass, android_winusb.inf, 11.0.0.0, 2014-00-28
https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb

Checked the text files of what I copied from the command prompt window, and ran the command again. The truncation happened in the command prompt.

NirSoft DevManView doesn't see any android_usb.inf It shows an ADB (Android Desktop Bus) interface using winusb.inf.

Here's what it shows for the Kobo device. It shows it using the same driver as a SanDisk Cruzer Glide USB 3.0 (not currently plugged in) and a Western Digital EasyStore 264D.

Kobo eReader USB Device Challenger Backup Solutions, LLC disk DiskDrive USBSTOR\Disk&Ven_Kobo&Prod_eReader&Rev_0110\KBN6470B3S07510&0 0x00000010 0x00000000 No Yes 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM {f72a3a99-d9fd-5998-92b1-26fd21fd881c} {4d36e967-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318} 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM System Reflection Flash Boot 2.3.72.0 oem154.inf FlashBoot_install 8/11/2013 4/21/2023 6:38:57 AM

It shows that the Kobo *should be* assigned as drive I: but it's not appearing in Explorer at all and Disk Management shows it as an unallocated drive. DevManView had a few entries for the Kobo WiFi as a Kobo 1.9.12 device, which it currently is not since fixing its corrupted internal micro SD by writing an image that has version 1.9. So far I have not been able to dig up the 1.9.12 firmware. Rakuten no longer lets their desktop software work with the model N647 and older, and older versions of their desktop software have been cut off because they changed the URL the software accesses.

I:\ Kobo WUDFWpdFs WPD SWD\WPDBUSENUM\{e35c9dde-d145-11ed-92d9-a8a15951109c}#0000000000000000 0x000000b0 0x00000000 No No 4/2/2023 5:12:41 AM 4/2/2023 5:12:41 AM {2f2e325f-ddc1-5d8d-97ea-ccba00a016d0} {eec5ad98-8080-425f-922a-dabf3de3f69a} 4/2/2023 5:12:41 AM 4/2/2023 5:12:41 AM 4/2/2023 5:12:40 AM 4/2/2023 5:13:50 AM WPD FileSystem Volume Driver 10.0.19041.746 wpdfs.inf Basic_Install 6/21/2006 4/2/2023 5:12:40 AM

I'm about ready to try an upgrade in place to see if that will 'steamroll' over all the currently installed drivers and make this thing work.

That's one thing I really miss about Windows 95. It could be brute forced into working* simply by installing it over itself and at worst only some of the 3rd party software would have to be reinstalled - but any problem with *Windows* would absolutely be fixed because the installer didn't care about version or date conflicts. It simply overwrote all the Windows files. that started to be ruined with Windows 98 where it had some parts it could not be made to overwrite no matter what.

*I did encounter ONE instance where it wouldn't. I changed the critical stop sound on my personal desktop to a breaking glass sound and somehow that corrupted a single character in the Registry, which caused it to crash when any three things in Explorer were single left clicked one after another. I got soooo sick of hearing that breaking glass sound. That's also when I first encountered Windows' stupid protection of damaged files. It wouldn't allow any changes to the Registry, couldn't export and re-import it, couldn't overwrite it so reinstalling Windows would fail. I was able to get (IIRC) Total Commander on it to save every file I wanted to keep, then I erased the drive and started over. That windows install had been through five completely different PCs. I'd boot to Safe Mode, remove all the hardware drivers it would allow to be removed, shut down then move to the new PC. Only ever had to install drivers for the new hardware and all my programs would work.

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I got it to work, and here is how.

I exported all the drivers from my laptop with Windows 10 (where the Kobo WiFi N647 works) and put them onto a flash drive.

Then I went to Device Manager on the desktop (where the reader didn't work) and changed to view devices by connection.
Next I expanded ACPI x64-based PC > Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System > PCI Express Root Complex
Under there I drilled down on PCI Express Root Port entries until I found the USB controller and hub with eReader attached.

I tried updating the driver, pointed to the folder full of drivers from the laptop. It told me something different than what anything else I'd tried had shown. "System Reflection Flash Boot", but the "best driver" was already installed. (Obviously NOT the best one or the thing would be working!)

So I uninstalled the eReader with the box checked to delete the driver. Rebooted. Reconnected the Kobo and it still didn't work.

Back to Device Manager and had Windows Update look for a driver and it found a driver update for the Garmin GPS.

I unplugged the Kobo, rebooted, plugged the Kobo back in and now it works.