Kiara, I only followed your situation from halfway through, but I did see that the last thing you did before everything broke was update Win11. If the capture card happened to be connected during that update, there is a real possibility that the update process rewrote the USB-related hardware information—the so-called hardware tree—and corrupted the driver state of the capture card.
During a Win11 update, USB 3.x lanes can be temporarily disabled or reinitialized. If a device that depends on a dedicated high-bandwidth driver, like an Elgato capture card, is momentarily misrecognized and reattached under an outdated device ID, Win11 may fail to treat it as new hardware. The hardware enumeration process then breaks somewhere in the middle, leaving the driver registration stuck in a half-broken “ghost state.” As a result, after reboot, the system fails to detect the capture card at all.
In this ghosted state, Win11 often fails to initialize devices such as the HD60 S+. And if any old ghost Elgato entries remain in the system, the OS may mistakenly believe that the same device ID is already present, causing it to skip the driver installation entirely. A simple rollback of the Win11 update typically does not resolve the issue, because both the corrupted USB 3.x controller state and the old Elgato device entries continue to persist underneath.
A proper recovery requires rebuilding the USB controller. Open Device Manager, go to “Universal Serial Bus Controllers,” uninstall the USB 3.0 or 3.1 host controller, and restart so Win11 can rebuild it from scratch. After that, reinstall the official chipset driver from the motherboard manufacturer. Then enable “Show hidden devices” in Device Manager and delete every ghost Elgato entry. Removing hidden devices is completely safe and does not harm the PC. If they remain, Win11 will continue to assume that the disconnected capture card is still attached, preventing proper reinitialization.
Only after completing all of these steps should the capture card be reconnected.