Re-install your USB drivers with DevCon Command Line Utility
By Madhur Kapoor on Dec 27, 2007 in Tech, Tutorials
This guest post was written by Nirmal from Life Rocks! 2.0, where he blogs about Technology, Internet, Blogging, Reviews, Tips and Tutorials. Do read his blog for some great content and Subscribe to his feed for regular updates.
The DevCon utility is a command-line utility that acts as an alternative to Device Manager. Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices. DevCon also provides information that is relevant to the driver developer and is not available in Device Manager.
DevCon will erase all of your USB device drivers, making your PC just like new. Then it will scan to relocate the devices and reinstall their drivers. So in case any of your USB decives shows problems or cannot find drivers needed, then its best to run this utility.
A detailed tutorial on how to use DevCon and the commands to be used are available here. DevCon is a Microsoft product. Remember to create a system restore point before using DevCon
You can use DevCon with Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and Vista. You cannot use DevCon with Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Millennium Edition.
Nirmal,
Very useful tool. I have had problems detecting my usb drive in one of my older machines. Let me see if this is the magic wand I have been looking for.
K-IntheHouse | Dec 27, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for the post. It helped me a lot.
may be i can write a guest post too.
PC | Dec 27, 2007 | Reply
Hey, I have a doubt here. There are times when I try to “safely remove hardware” but unfortunately it keeps on giving me a message saying the device is still running. Now, if I ever happen to pull out the USB drive, it just won’t get detected next time unless I restart my machine. Do u think there might be a cure for this phenomenon?
Shayon | Dec 28, 2007 | Reply
Once it happaned to me that all usb drives started erratic behavior ..wish i have known devcon at that time.
Shashank | Dec 28, 2007 | Reply
Thanks everyone, Glad that you liked the utility.
Nirmal | Dec 31, 2007 | Reply