How To Enable USB Ports To Open Your Pen Drive at College And Office?

Trouble:

We have observed this problem at may places that you need some data on your pen drive but the USB drive or pen drive does not work. Windows gives a notification

“Found new hardware, USB Mass Storage Device, please install drivers for it.”

Windows will now show a New Hardware Wizard to install the drivers. Lets see in details how we can fix this problem.

Fix:

There are more than one ways in which the USB drives are disabled by Administrators at offices or colleges or schools. These methods are:

1. By Disabling USB Ports from Device Manager.

2. By Tweaking Registry values for USB Mass Storage Devices.

3. By Un-installing the USB Mass Storage Drivers.

We will see how to fix all these situations one by one. But before you begin, you must have administrator rights on that computer to fix the issue. If you don’t have the rights, see this post on getting admin rights on windows computer.

Lets go one by one for the solution now.

UNLOCK USB PORTS FROM DEVICE MANAGER:

If USB ports are disabled, you aren't able to open your pen drive. To enable it, follow the following steps:

1. Click on Start menu and then click on Run.
2. Type devmgmt.msc to open Device Manager.
3. After opening "Device Manager", click on Universal Serial Bus Controllers. You may see there are small cross marks on "USB Universal Host Controller". This means the USB ports are disabled by the computer administrator. Right click on those and click on Enable to enable your pen drive.

Now try and use the pen drive. If it works fine, then great, else read the next two steps also.

CORRECT REGISTRY VALUE FOR USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE

1. Go to Start > Run , type “regedit” and press enter, this will open registry editor.

2. Navigate to the keyHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\USBSTOR

3. Double-click on the “Start” key to modify its value, change the value to 3 and press OK.

Now remove and connect the pen drive again, it should work fine, if it does not, then it means the drivers are missing. Follow the steps below to solve the issue.

INSTALL USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE DRIVERS

In case the USB Mass Storage drivers are not installed, windows will prompt you to install the driver. In such a case, windows will launch Hardware Update Wizard. If you have USB Mass storage drivers, you can install it and restart the computer, it should work. If not, you can download the USB Mass Storage drivers here. Download and unzip the driver files on your desktop.

1. In hardware update wizard, Select the option to install the driver from a specific location and click next.

2. Now on this screen, click browse and select the path on which you have un-zipped the drivers and press ok.

NOTE: Windows may give you a warning that the drivers has not passed Windows logo testing, so stop installation or Continue anyway, Select Continue anyway to complete installation.

 

Now restart your computer and re-insert your pen drive, it should now work.