TravelingPacket – A blog of network musings

The other day I needed to use the the blue mini-USB console cable that Cisco will now send. Its been around a long time, but I always have my normal console laying around and just use that. When I attempted to use it I first installed the USB driver provided by Cisco, everything seemed to work, but I could not open the com port. Today I did some research and got it working – I was just missing a small part, but thought I would write up the steps to try and help someone else. My OS is Windows 10.

So first we have to install the USB driver this can be downloaded from Cisco.com , using your CCO account.  Then install according to the computer, and then reboot. The problem comes in after the reboot – Windows will use the Windows USB driver, and not the Cisco one. So you have to manually change it.

So to walk through, after the install/reboot I connected the cable – Went into device manager to see what com port it was associated to. Com3. Great, then I tried to console to that port – and it would not work.

So, after a lot of troubleshooting I found that you need to update the driver to a locally install one, and when you do that Cisco’s driver will pop up. Those steps are below.

So, lets first change the driver.

Select “update driver software”

Then Select “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer”

Bam! Now, select the Cisco driver.

Now, we see that Cisco serial driver is in use.

So, now we should be able to launch Putty and change it to COM3 and it should work.

Thats it!

cisco usb console driver not working

Cisco USB