Cleanup unsuccessful device installations in Windows

Recently I had a problem on my laptop where no new USB Drives could be installed, hard drives or USB keys that had been previously been installed connected and worked fine, but a new device would never install successfully.  After searching around a little I found this trick to see “Hidden Devices” in Device manager to be able to clean up the failed installs.  To cleanup failed installs (or see other installed devices that are not present) do the following 1. open an command prompt and type “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1” 2. from the same command prompt run “start %windir%system32devmgmt.msc” Once device manager opens select View,  Show Hidden Devices A picture named M2 You should then have an “Other Devices” section listed in device manager A picture named M3 Once I cleaned out the Unknown Devices, I was able to attach a new USB Hard drive without any problems.

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