Jan
6
iPhone problem – solved – USB unrecognized device in Windows
January 6, 2009 | 6 Comments
Are you getting ‘USB unrecognized device’ when plugging your iPhone into your PC?
Are you completely fed-up with your iPhone?
We were having the same trouble and after days spent searching the internet we have eventually found a solution … read on
About 2 weeks after we got our iPhone it stopped charging from the mains. It would just sit there with the battery message flashing. Thinking it might sort itself out after some time we left it on all night only to find that nothing had happened.
I plugged it into the PC and it began charging – yippeee some progress! But then disaster! An icon popped up in the system tray .. ‘USB device unrecognized’. That’s when I noticed iTunes hadn’t launched, and I couldn’t access it via Explorer either – it was in fact almost dead!
I tried uninstalling iTunes – and re-installing – that didn’t work either
That’s right we did some research on the internet and people were suggesting completely removing iTunes and then re-installing – so we did that. Result? – same problem ‘USB device unrecognized’
By this time I wanted to put it in the trash and blame Steve Jobs for a bad device
And then we found the problem -> The iPhone USB cable was broken
We tested the iPhone in 3 PCs and one Mac – nothing – dead as a frickin Dodo. Always the same error. It had to be the phone, or the cable. On a hunch we went back to the Apple Store and asked them to try it .. they indeed got the same error message. So I asked them to try a different USB cable …. and ta da (fanfare goes here) it worked!!!.
iPhone USB unrecognized device problem – try a new USB cable!!
let us know how you get on
Comments
6 Comments so far
shame on those who give up: Here is one solution (XP & sp3):
Control Panel-System-Hardware tab-Device Manager-Universal Serial Bus controllers: Right click and DISABLE the 1st (?) called ” **/DBM USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller – 24CD”.
The little “iPHONE” icon shall be popping up shortly thereafter when both XP and iTunes recognizes your iphone/ipod
No negative side-effects have been discovered so far.
Enjoy!
F
ok oen thing !!! a new usb is only good for battery charging !!! who da hell say that to change the the usb setting it dont even detect!!!
I found that mine was fixed simply by moving my iPhone to another block of USB ports. The two on the front wouldn’t work, but the block in the back did. Once it started working again, I can use the front USB ports. Meh?
Careful with disabling the USB 2 drivers. I found that the iPhone would connect the first time I tried that trick but I made sure I re-enabled the drivers before turning my pc off. Altho this worked it was at USB 1 speeds and hence my wireless Internet doesn’t work without it. The next time I tried this trick the pc asked me to reboot, not seeing any harm, I did.. I rebooted and both my mouse and keyboard are USB and they stopped working. It took me hours to discover the disable USB 2 controller in the bios which then allowed me to use the mouse and keyboard. The driver for USB 2 is now gone and so I have to get xp sp3 off a friend to get USB 2 back on.
I was getting the same USB unrecognized error in XP, with my iPhone 2G. I tried four different USB cables on multiple USB ports, on three different computer, and no luck. I finally took the iPhone apart, reseated all of the ribbon cables inside, put it back together, plugged it in, and was detected as an iPhone device by Windows!
you can always tell the quality of USB cables by looking at the thickness of the cable. thicker usb cables have higher quality :*;