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Driver approach for USB Blaster, Windows 7 64 bit

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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For those trying to make USB Blaster work on 64 bit Windows 7, and searched here without finding a simple solution, here is an approach that worked for me... 

 

I previously had everything working on a 32bit machine, using Quartus 32 bit version 11.1 Web edition. But couldn't get Terasic USB Blaster to work on 64 bit Windows laptop, even using exactly same edition of Quartus and same drivers. 

 

I finally got drivers that work from: 

 

http://www.ftdichip.com/drivers/vcp.htm , the people that make the USB interface chip 

 

On that page, they are the Windows drivers, dated 2017-08-30, version 2.12.28, WHQL Certified. Includes VCP and D2XX. I downloaded and unzipped into a directory. 

 

Next I located the 5 files associated with the existing driver that Quartus kept using (even though I wanted to update it) in: 

c:\windows\system32\ usbblstr32.dll, usbblstrlang.dll, usbblstrui.dll 

c:\windows\SysWOW64\ usbblstr32.dll 

c:\windows\system32\drivers\ usbblstr32.dll 

 

I found these by looking at the installed driver properties for the USB Blaster in Device manager.  

 

I renamed (rather than deleted, just to be cautious) the extensions to disable these files, then plugged in Blaster and did normal Windows driver installation using the drivers downloaded from the ftdichip.com web site. And this worked! 

 

I think I've covered everything I did. Not all steps may be necessary, but this is what worked for me.
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