"The directory name is invalid" when trying to install drivers in Windows 7 via Device Manager
- by Luke
First off, this computer is not mine, it's a customer's system. Having said that...
The hard drive was moved to a new motherboard, CPU, RAM combo, and booted up fine. Customer puts in driver CD, drivers won't load. He brings it into me.
Under Device Manager for Windows 7 x64, I see lots of PCI to PCI bridge, one SMBus Controller, and about 20 Unknown Devices. Greeeeeat... So I start with the SMBus driver directly from the Asus website for the motherboard (P8H77-M Pro). If I install from the setup program, it tells me to reboot, then it starts the install. It gets half way through the setup, then fails (An unknown error occurred. Setup will exit). When I try to point to the folder from Device Manager, it starts copying files for the driver, even presents me with the proper name of the device, but says that an error has occurred there as well: The directory name is invalid.
Doing some Googling, I saw that many people had this issue with Vista. K, Vista and 7 are similar, maybe the solutions are the same... But they aren't.
I tried:
Copying the entire driver folder and setup utility to the Program Files folder and running it / selecting it in DM
Downloading another set of drivers in case this one is corrupt
Disabling UAC
Deleting and recreating the %WINDIR%\TEMP folder
Removing all references to previous hardware that I could find, even in Device Manager's hidden mode
So far, nothing has worked. A wipe and reload will be out of the question
