FCD/FCD+ and Zadig – DON’T!!!

Folks

Increasingly recently we’ve been seeing problems where the symptoms suggest that folks have used a utility called Zadig to override the operating system’s own drivers, probably because there has been experience with an RTL dongle where it’s common to have to hack user-mode access to the device, overriding the device’s own drivers.

Fundamental to the FCD’s and FCD+’s design was to make it as easy to install as possible, and that means that it uses drivers that are native to your operating system so you don’t have to mess about fruitlessly searching the internet for the right driver, or, indeed use Zadig.

Using Zadig to override the operating system’s drivers for the FCD & FCD+ will not work!

What’s worse is that Zadig doesn’t appear to present a clean way to uninstall its own work from the investigations I’ve done, so getting you back to square one isn’t as easy as it was to install those pesky Zadig configured drivers in the first place.

In order to uninstall it’s a bit complex but here’s a recipe.

o Insert the FCD+ if it isn’t already.

o Look in your C:\Windows\Inf directory and look for all the oem*.inf files which relate to the FCD or FCD+. They are text files, so you can open them in notepad.

o Open an administrator command prompt and run “pnputil -f -d oem##.inf” for each oem##.inf file you found.

o In Device Manager, find entries marked “FUNcube Dongle V2.0 (Interface #)”, right click each and uninstall.

o Remove the FCD/FCD+.

o Now, after 10 or 10 seconds, reinsert the FCD+ and you should now have the device properly recognised. I recommend too that you take this opportunity to read the manual.

When properly working, the FCD+ presents a sound device (FUNcube Dongle V2.0), a human interface device (“HID-compliant device”), and under Universal Serial Bus controllers there should be a “USB Composite Device” entry for it. When properly configured, whn removing the FCD these three entries should all automatically disappear, and reappear when inserted.

If you still have entries in Device Manager in the form “FUNcube Dongle V2.0 (Interface #)” then you still have work to do to uninstall them.

Removing Zadig’s work is messy, time-consuming, and prone to possibly catastrophic errors if you remove the wrong driver.

So, to save yourself a whole lot of grief, the advice is simple: while you are welcome to use Zadig with your other devices, please DO NOT USE ZADIG under any circumstances to override the drivers for the FCD or FCD+!

Many thanks, Howard