Great minds, prepare to be stumped. (No seriously). Why does this work?!

[CurrentlyPissed]

Ok awhile back I did the Windows 8.1 upgrade when it came out. Did a fresh format, and all. Doing drivers my Sound Blaster Z driver would hard lock the PC. Every. Single. Time.

Eventually after hours of trying to figure it out I installed windows 8 first, then installed the driver, then upgraded to 8.1. Worked fine. (this isnt the stumping part, it's coming I promise).

Bought a new mouse (Logitech G700s) went to install the software... Low and behold. Same thing. Everything else has installed fine, games, other software, etc.

Well today, due to an issue I had to reformat. I figured while I had the time I'd try to figure out those driver issues.

Reformated, same thing on both. After hours, of literally trying EVERYTHING. And looking for everything. Oddly I found someone with a similiar issue. And he states he found the fix. The problem is, the fix seemed so troll I almost didn't bother. But after spending almost 4 hours trying to figure it out. I said.. What the hell.

Here it is, you ready?

Unplugging the CD-DVD drive and installing the software while the drive is unplugged and it installs first try, every time. I even reformated 3 more times just to verify this was fixing the issue... And it did.

Seriously. Why in the heck would unplugging the CD DRIVE fix an installation issue?!

The only thing I noticed was they were hanging up when "adding devices" such as "speakers" for the audio card, and "usb object" for the mouse. When that window is suppose to pop up and you click "install" in the middle of the install that's what it was trying to do. But for some reason with the CD-DVD installed, it wouldn't allow it.


Go ahead smarty pants. Figure out this one for me. :hmm:

 

[RampantAndroid]

Maybe it was looking for something on the DVD drive? It's software from Creative, NOTHING should surprise you. These are the clowns who blamed IRQ interrupts and RAM timings for their sound cards locking up BF2 back in the day, when in fact it was their shitty drivers. Creative has been writing truly TERRIBLE software since the early 90s.

I was banned from their forums for saying they were wrong on the BF2 issue. Yay for USB DACs and ASUS cards.

 

[CurrentlyPissed]

Maybe it was looking for something on the DVD drive? It's software from Creative, NOTHING should surprise you. These are the clowns who blamed IRQ interrupts and RAM timings for their sound cards locking up BF2 back in the day, when in fact it was their shitty drivers. Creative has been writing truly TERRIBLE software since the early 90s.

I was banned from their forums for saying they were wrong on the BF2 issue. Yay for USB DACs and ASUS cards.

Did you miss the part where I said it was doing it for Logitech s software too though?

 

[RampantAndroid]

Did you miss the part where I said it was doing it for Logitech s software too though?

Their software is marginally better, imo (I dread buying theater equipment because I'd need to program my remote again. Ick.)

It's probably trying to look on the drive to see what's there and the drive won't spin up or something. Who knows. Try a new drive.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Also, did you try ctrl+alt+del? If that works, kill explorer.exe and restart it. I've seen explorer hang but the system itself run fine.

 

[code65536]

Now this is certainly a horse of a different color...

1) Does it have to be a physical disconnect of the drive? It would help a lot if we could narrow down what it is about the ODD that's causing the failure:
a) What happens if you put a (readable, functional) disc in the drive? Doesn't have to contain anything in particular, but just so that any attempt to read from the drive will result in file-not-found instead of device-not-available.
b) If (a) doesn't work, what about unmapping the ODD's drive letter using the disk management console?
c) If (b) doesn't work, what about disabling the ODD in the device manager?

2) If it works in Windows 8 but not Windows 8.1, what changed? Did 8.1 introduce a bug (and why haven't I seen it?), or did a bug fix in 8.1 expose a previously-hidden bug?

3) The "adding devices" stage--I assume that's the bit where there's a little animated icon in the system notification tray area and if you clicked on it, it brings up a window showing the progress? (Just making sure we're on the same page here.)

 

[rgallant]

I removed my internal sata drive for a extra port but at the time there was something about the hd light always flashing as the sata drive polls the system per second.
now I just use a usb external.

but maybe your mb bios keeps updating windows when it polls ,causing a conflict with the driver install maybe.

 

[sweenish]

*Lo and behold

That's all I have to contribute.

 

[dlock13]

I had this problem a long, long time ago. Every time my system would freeze whilst playing a game, I had to pop out my DVD drive to get it to unfreeze. It was the most ridiculous thing ever.

 

[CurrentlyPissed]

Now this is certainly a horse of a different color...

1) Does it have to be a physical disconnect of the drive? It would help a lot if we could narrow down what it is about the ODD that's causing the failure:
a) What happens if you put a (readable, functional) disc in the drive? Doesn't have to contain anything in particular, but just so that any attempt to read from the drive will result in file-not-found instead of device-not-available.
b) If (a) doesn't work, what about unmapping the ODD's drive letter using the disk management console?
c) If (b) doesn't work, what about disabling the ODD in the device manager?

2) If it works in Windows 8 but not Windows 8.1, what changed? Did 8.1 introduce a bug (and why haven't I seen it?), or did a bug fix in 8.1 expose a previously-hidden bug?

3) The "adding devices" stage--I assume that's the bit where there's a little animated icon in the system notification tray area and if you clicked on it, it brings up a window showing the progress? (Just making sure we're on the same page here.)

1.) Yes
2.) Same issue persist even with disc in drive
3.) Works in 8 just fine, issue is only in 8.1
4.) No, the the adding devises in not in the notification tray. This is when a window pops up mid-installation saying "Creative Speakers" or "Logitech Mouse" followed by the option to "allow" or "deny"

 

[Savij]

My guess: It's scanning for HW and something in the device id vendor id makes the installer think that is a target device and it tries to install drivers and check if it worked by querying the HW only to find that it didn't respond as expected and the installer craps out.

Edit: I accept that I may be an idiot and have no idea what I'm talking about.