Posted By Ian on Jul 8, 2004 | 0 comments

     I had a weird thing happen on my notebook and I just wanted to document it, in case anyone else runs into the same thing. I got a new hard disk and on Sony’s site, they have instructions on how to load all of the software that came with the notebook from a fresh Windows installation. This was much more appealing to me than using the recovery disks. When I installed the Sony Vaio drivers, at some point in the process it changed a registry key from “%SystemRoot%/inf” to “inf;DriversAudio;DriversAudio2…”. There were a whole bunch of directories listed there. So, when I tried to install any new hardware (or my system tried automatically) it couldn’t find those paths. I simply changed the key to: “%SystemRoot%inf;%SystemRoot%DriversAudio;%SystemRoot%DriversAudio2…” and it started working properly again (and I could install my new printer properly without having to go through windows update). I stumbled upon the key accidentally at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion and it’s called “DevicePath”. I’m quite proud as this is the first time that I haven’t been able to find the answer to my problem online and I simply solved it myself.