Fixing USB Blaster on Windows 7 x64bit

Since this has been posted many times in many threads, I thought posting a new thread would allow this post to be found more easily.

Like many others I had an older version of Quartus that worked fine with the USB Blaster (mine is the Terasic Blaster as well as the built-in versions on DE-2 and other boards).

Last week I upgraded to the web/free version of Quartus 12sp2. Today I went to use my USB Blaster and found that it was not showing up under the add hardware button of the programmer portion of Quartus.

After unsuccessfully trying several of the suggestions in other posts, I found a reference to going into the bin64 directory of quartus and running .\jtagserver --status . I tried this on my machine, I was surprised that the jtagserver that was running was an older version (I did not un-install the older version before installing the new one).

I went into the older version's bin64 directory and (in a power shell) ran ./jtagserver --uninstall . I then returned to the new version's bin64 directory and ran .\jtagserver --install and .\jtagserver --status. At this point the correct version of jtagserver seemed to be running.

I returned to Quartus and went into tools->programmer->add hardware (button) . The first time I got an error 82, but after restarting and replugging the blaster, the unit showed up and is functioning fine.

I hope this helps!

:o