USB Devices Not Recognized on Your Computer?

If you’re finding USB devices not recognized there could a number of reasons for this which we will cover below.

Do you hear the bong sound when a USB device is plugged in?

Hear a Bong Sound but USB Devices Not Recognized

Normally when you plug in a USB device your computer should make a make a bong or a double bong sound, do you hear this? Make sure the volume is turned up as this is a good way to tell if the device is being recognised.

If you hear the bong sound then it means the device is being recognized as being plugged in, but it could mean a driver problem, if it’s a storage device more often than not it’s just hidden, by this I mean its trying to use the same drive letter as another device.

The easiest way to fix this is to go into Disk Management and then change the drive letter to one that’s not in use, the next time you plug in the device it should remember the free drive letter that it last used.

If you are using another device such as a printer or scanner even if the device makes the bong sound when connected make sure it is using the correct drivers.

The easiest way to check this is to go to Device Manager (this can be accessed by right clicking on computer or my computer and selecting manage – device manager) Now look for any little Yellow exclamation marks.

This indicates if the device does not have the correct driver installed, right click on the device and select update driver and point it at the driver CD or download the correct driver from the manufacturer’s website.

If your computer is asking for USB drivers for absolutely everything, keyboards, flash drives etc then it may be a problem with Windows USB driver location.

Windows as a default has a large driver database for USB devices and it should have drivers for just about any standard hardware such as flash drives, external hard drive and keyboards etc, but are common USB devices not recognized ? then Windows may have lost the location to the driver database.

To get Windows to find the USB driver database again it’s normally just a quick registry change and a single file to delete.

To launch the Registry editor type Regedit from the Start Run menu

Before making any changes to your Windows registry make sure to back it up first.

Once presented with the Registry editor screen drill down to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion

Now you should be able to see a string labelled DevicePath – check to make sure that amongst everything else in the string it also contains %SystemRoot%\inf, if its missing just add it to the beginning and insert a semi colon after it for example %SystemRoot%\inf;

Now close the Registry editor and go My Computer C:Windows\inf\ and delete the file INFCACHE.1 (Windows will recreate this file)

No I Don’t Hear a Bong Sound
Once again make sure your computers sound is working, by playing a media or audio file is an easy way to confirm this.

No bong sound will now mean one of two things, either the USB port or ports are not working; (Again this can be checked in device manager) or the device you are attempting to plug-in has a problem.

When checking in device manager look for the USB ports and see if they have any yellow exclamation marks in front of them, if so follow the procedure above to rectify this.

Most of the time device problems can easily be pinpointed by plugging them into another computer and seeing if the fault still occurs.

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