Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorHi Thomas
Did you actually read all of the instructions which in one of the steps tells you to turn on test mode?? I'm pretty sure all of this is fixed now, as the last update I used from Quartus seems to have installed the driver correctly, so we no longer need this method unless altera forget to sign the driver again ;) --- Quote Start --- You cannot sign a PnP kernal driver this way. PnP kernal driver, such as USB-Blaster, requires the creation of a catalog file that contains a hash for each file in the driver package. It is both not necessary and not sufficient to sign the individual driver files (e.g. FTDIBUS.sys). In order to run the driver without turning your machine into a kernal driver test bench, the catalog file must then be signed by the Microsoft WHQL. This a free process for commercial software vendors (it does require that the vendor have a commercial signing certificate, which costs about $150). The driver package's .inf file must have a pointer to the .cat file. During the installation, the .cat file is installed in the driver repository (I believe at C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\). During the catalog signing process, MSFT runs tests on the kernal driver to insure that it won't blue-screen your system. I suspect that the recent USB-Blaster drivers do not contain a signed catalog because they indeed do not pass these tests. I received a version of the USB-Blaster driver from Altera support that does contain a signed catalog. I believe that this is an old version. The .inf says it version 2.0.0, dated 05/19/2006. The file versions in this package are 2.0.0.1 for FTDIBUS.sys and 3.1.7.1 for the FTD2 library dlls. --- Quote End ---
