Overview
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I bought a Western Digital External USB Hard Drive and was able to use it on my desktop without any issue. I then attempted to use it on my laptop and was presented with the "Found New Hardware Wizard." After reading hundreds of posts with a few claiming to have a solution, I found no solutions which would work, short of reinstalling Windows.

It was very frustrating reading many of the posts as most of the responses were asking for further information about the hardware when the poster knew it was a software issue or telling the poster how to initialize the drive. If the respondent had read the poster's question they would not have posted an unrelated answer as the drive needs to be recognized by device manager before it can be used in disk manager.

I am posting what I did to get my USB HDD to work however it is not a solution to the underlying problem. If anyone knows how to fix the underlying problem please post a reply here. In the meantime I hope this helps other who have been searching for a fix for connecting a USB device which uses Windows default drivers but Windows prompts the user with the "New Hardware Found Wizard."

Troubleshooting Steps
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- Rule out the hardware
+ Checked that the HDD worked on another PC
+ Used VMWare to ensure that it worked on the Laptop's hardware
- Used Goggle to search on the issue & checked a few things which made sense but were correct in my case
+ Checked that the Cryptographic Services was running
+ Checked the registry entry for the path of drivers (I do not recall the registry path but the value was %SystemRoot%\Inf;...)
+ Other things such as the location of files and others that I do not recall

Workaround
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I found one post at http://www.ureader.com/message/1083780.aspx, which led me to try copying the registry entry from a working machine to the laptop. When I copied the registry entry from the machine which worked to the one which did not, the HDD worked. As I said earlier this really does not fix the problem but did get the HDD working.

Steps
- Using Device Manager I looked for the device under "Other Devices". Right clicked on the Unknown device and selected properties. In the properties dialog, viewed the "Details" tab and noted the "Device Instance Id". In my case, the "Device Instance Id" was "USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705&MI_00\6&344189D4&0&0000" for a Western Digital Elite 500GB USB Hard Drive.
- On the working machine, I opened regedit and went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705 and exported the registry
- Copied the exported registry entry to the laptop and attempted to import it into the registry but ran into some permission issues and was unable to update the registry
- Opened regedt32 on the laptop and gave Everyone full access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\Vid_1058&Pid_0705 and imported the registry file, which worked fine this time
- Removed the full control access for the Everyone group
- Connected the HDD and it worked as expected

Summary
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I was very frustrated at finding no solutions to fixing the issue of Windows not using the default drivers for hardware such as USB Hard Disk Drives (HDD), USB Hubs, USB Keyboards, etc. I decided to write this post to help others who may be very frustrated as well and ask if anyone knows what the underlying problem is and has a solution please follow up with a solution.

Thank You
Rich