Thinkpads Forum

So I just did a Rescue and Recovery factory restore on an R51. After running updates I went to connect a USB stick. I heard the "New Hardware" sound, but it didn't try to install the drivers automatically. I went to the device manager and installed the drivers. The drive still didn't show up. I went to Disk Management and the drive wasn't active and it didn't have a drive letter. So I marked it as active and gave it a letter. It still doesn't show up in windows... but I can access it from the command prompt.

So I'm guess there is an "automatic install" option that's not activated. I checked all of the services (including Plug and Play) with an XP system that doesn't have this problem and they are all at the same setting.

Any ideas?

Did you reboot the machine and did it then recognize the stick?

I rebooted, didn't recognize, same thing, required manual driver install

I figured it out thanks to this post: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/asp ... t-ins.aspx

Basically, the restore didn't finish and take the machine out of factory mode. It had stalled while installing the video driver and apparently didn't get to the registry patch.

Changing this registry value did the job.

HKLM\system\setup

change "FactoryPreinstallInProgress" to "0"

Restart and bam! installed the hardware.