Yesterday my littlest one had a dance/recital/show at his preschool.  I took videos on my iPhone of the event, and then promptly spent the better part of last night trying to get my iPhone to act as a USB storage device so I could copy the two movies off.  My phone works fine in iTunes; I can sync music and movies to the phone just fine.  But when I tried to browse it in Windows the iPhone kept showing up as an “iPhone” but refused to load any drivers.

After quite a bit of searching and attempting a number of different technique (including, but not limited to, reinstalling the usbaapl64 driver, removing and reinstalling iTunes, and poking around at the registry), I came across this website: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/236489-cannot-find-iphone-driver-windows-64-bit.

As it turns out, the MSDN licensed Windows 8.1 I have installed is actually “Windows 8.1 Enterprise N”.  The “N” evidently stands for “Not gonna work properly”.  Unlike the poster in the article (who was using Windows 7), Windows Media Player is already installed.  However the “Media Feature pack”, available at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260410, was not.  I don’t really know what the media feature pack is, why it’s not included in the default Windows install, why iTunes relies on it, or why iTunes doesn’t prompt you to download it, but I removed the existing driver, installed the media feature pack, and then Windows correctly configured my iPhone driver when I plugged the USB cable in.

Thank you Bryan Amundson at Spiceworks, I’m fairly certain I never would have figured this one out on my own.