Pete Pipe said:
Thank you, Alec, for coming back. I appreciate it.
Yes, I reinstalled exactly as you believed to be the case.
Your new suggestion has me a bit worried. There are over 700 PNF files in
...\inf. Surely, deleting all these will have all kind of effects? I don't
understand what these files do and I hesitate to query your wisdom, but can
you reassure me please?
Yes there will be plenty of PNF files in there, one for every INF file. You'll notice that the Type column describes that as
"Precompiled Setup Information" and describes INF files as "Setup Information". INF files contain the textual data used to setup
software, drivers, etc. and are human-readable, while PNF files are the compiled, machine-readable version. PNF files are created
from the INF files when devices are being installed. They allow the system to locate drivers faster than if they system had to
manually search through and parse the INF files.
It is perfectly safe to delete PNF files (in fact you will free up a huge chunk of space on the drive) because as I said, they will
be recreated automatically when needed; you'll notice that ALL of the PNF files have dates later than the INF files, in fact they
will probably be tagged with the date that Windows was installed-or later. The reason I said to delete them is because your system
may very well be installing old/stale/out-of-date drivers which is causing your problem. If you delete the driver cache (the PNF
files) and then install the drives, you will force the system to recreate the cache and read all the INF files from scratch. When it
does so, it will find and use the new drivers instead of falling back on the old cached one. That's why I recommended it.
Note, that since it has to recreate the driver cache, when it detects the new, uninstalled drive, it will seem to hang the system.
The drive activity light will go on and stay solid for a while and the CPU will be 100% used. This is normal, it is rebuilding the
driver cache, reading, parsing, compiling, and writing over 700 files, but will eventually finish.
Let me know what happens.