Getting the ProMicro to work on Win7x64

Hi guys, I’m really new to Arduino and Sparkfun products and someone gave me the ProMicro (5v/16MHz). Whenever I try to follow the installation guide, I blue screen. I’m working on a Windows 7 64-bit machine. I’ve snooped around online to see how other people managed to get theirs working, but none of the fixes have worked for me. If anyone could help a newbie out I’d greatly appreciate it!

No problems occured with my system.

I’m not even sure I needed the FTDI drivers. Sounds like you have some sort of corruption.

Try uninstalling the drivers. Do you see the ftdi device at all before the blue screen occurs?

Ok let me go into more detail about the issue:

Here is the setup tutorial I am using:

http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/338

I can’t get the drivers to install. Whenever I select the setup file, it warns me about it not being digitally signed (as the tutorial said it would) and then begins installing the driver. However, before finishing, I get a blue screen with the error BAD_POOL_CALL. This error means that a driver was not installed correctly and windows had to explode. Well, after restarting, I see the Sparkfun ProMicro5 show up in the device manager, but with a little yellow exclamation point that once again reassures me that the drivers were not installed correctly. Additionally, it has not been assigned a port; ie it doesn’t say something like Sparkfun ProMicro5 (COM5), its missing the (COM5) part. However, after my computer restarts and I open the device manager, for the tiniest bit of a second it does say it was assigned a port, COM5, but then the yellow exclamation appears and the COM5 disappears.

A few of the fixes I’ve tried:

Some people elsewhere on the web said they solved the problem by moving the Arduino Leonardo . inf and the ProMicro .inf into the windows INF folder; didn’t work.

Some have suggested changing a line in the INF to: %DESCRIPTION%=DriverInstall, USB\VID_1B4F&PID_0003&REV_0100&MI_00 in the NTamd64 section, adding the &MI_00. still blue screen.

I have scrapped everything and started all over, but still I can’t get the drivers to install and I blue screen. Could it be a hardware issue? The device is brand new (still in original packaging when I received it) so I’m not sure.

Doh! I have the promini not the promicro. Sorry man…

Well good news! It finally works. I decided to follow through on your(coyote20000) suggestion that there might be some corruption with the bootloader, and lo and behold you were correct! I tried with a NEW promicro and followed the steps without a hitch this time. However, I only discovered the device was corrupted when I switched to a vista machine which straight up told me the device was unrecognizable and was most likely corrupt. Everything works now!

PROBLEM SOLVED, THREAD COMPLETE