'There was a problem installing this hardware. The required
section was not found in the INF'
As a computer consultant, I deal with a variety of electronics besides
computers including cell phones, DVRs, etc. I recently helped a
customer connect her Samsung Galaxy S2 cell phone to her Windows PC
when it wouldn't work correctly. She had downloaded the Samsung drivers
for the Galaxy S2 from
Samsung's
website and installed them, but when she tried connecting the
cell phone via USB she was greeted with the message above. This message
appeared after the USB driver was loaded for the cell phone itself. The
error was happening when trying to install the MTP Driver. Since this
driver did not load, the cell phone would not show in My Computer or
pop up with box asking her what she wanted to do. Instead, she was just
met with the cryptic message of "there was a problem installing this
hardware. The required section was not found in the INF".
The error remained after deleting registry entries, rebooting,
downloading different drivers, etc. Nothing seemed to fix the issue.
MTP stands for
Media
Transfer Protocol. Its a protocol developed by Microsoft for
the transfer of information from intelligent storage devices
such as digital audio players, smart phones, personal digital
assistants, and other devices. Any device that deals with digital
rights management will probably be using MTP.
So, even though the cell phone was technically connected to the PC, it
couldn't transfer data because the MTP protocol would not load.
This led me in a completely different direction that
seemingly was unrelated to the problem because it did not deal with
driver issues.
The PC we were trying to connect to was a Windows XP Service Pack 3 PC.
WinXP is only MTP compliant if Windows Media Player 10 or version 11 is
installed. In this case WMP 11 was installed. So, I uninstalled version
11 of Windows Media Player, then
downloaded
WMP 11 and reinstalled it from the Internet.
After rebooting the PC just to be safe, I connected the Samsung Galaxy
S2 smartphone to the PC again and lo and behold the MTP driver
installed correctly and her cell phone SIM Card and Internal Memory
were available from My Computer.
Problem solved.