Can't Charge iPhone with Windows with restricted USB Policy

Answers

USB should deliver one bin of power^* at all times. That means it should be able to charge, but very very slowly, though the device might decide not to do this.

If it wants more power it explicitly needs to ask for it. This involves communicating with the host PC. This part is probably blocked on your system.

That leaves us with two options:

Correct devices, following the standard. Those do the right thing and will only get 100mWatt max.
Devices which attempt to draw anyway, even in cases where this could damage the motherboard.

Sadly may devices fall in category 2.

How to solve this you can do three things:

Use a wall charger. Simplest, usually supplying way more power than a PC does, meaning faster charging).
Use a regular cable and see if it does charge, though probably at 1/20th of the regular speed. (assuming that the iPhone does not consume any power during the charging, else it may use power faster than it receives it).
Try a USB cable with the data lines cut and only the power lines connected. This will sort of emulate a wall charge, causing some phone to try charge.

^* 1 bin of power us 100mWatt for USB 1 and USB2. It allows up to 5 bins after asking for it. For USB3 the limit is higher and 1 bin is 150mWatt.

Hennes

Posted 2016-03-31T04:54:03.810

Reputation: 60 739

"Try a USB cable with the data lines cut" Can I make any wire on my own? any manual to do so? would like to read more about it. – Umer – 2016-03-31T06:34:11.060

There are four lines in an USB 2 cables. two pairs, one pair for data, one for power. According to wikipedia the centerpair on the A connectors is for data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USB.svg). How that is wired in a specific cable is possible up to the manufacturer of the cable.

– Hennes – 2016-03-31T06:38:59.253

@Umer 'Cutting' the data lines can be done with a USB condom

– Jan Doggen – 2016-03-31T13:58:59.597

@JanDoggen - Interesting :) – Umer – 2016-03-31T17:56:25.460

2plug it into the wall? – Keltari – 2016-03-31T04:56:08.250

Ask your company if they did put such restriction and ask them to lift it. (And also the above comment). Usually external mass storage device restriction does not restrict the flow of electricity... so maybe you got a broken USB port? – Darius – 2016-03-31T04:56:55.623

@Keltari, ofcourse - but I wanted to know if something can be done while I keep my phone closer to me. – Umer – 2016-03-31T04:58:08.597

@Darius, definitely I can ask company but point is, Andoid devices get charging without any problem, iPhone doesn't. – Umer – 2016-03-31T04:59:35.403

@Umer Do you have a different cable you can test with? If other USB devices are getting power (just not being able to access it as USB mass storage device which are prevented) then your iPhone should do the same - getting power. You have a different problem - not related to software / PC restriction. – Darius – 2016-03-31T05:02:29.153

@Darius, yep, I tried connecting different cable. Also I used this particular cable with other machine at home, the cable worked perfectly fine... What I came to know that when you connect iPhone with a PC, it installs its drivers (and attaches iphone as mass storage). In a restricted environment, I cannot install anything - so probably I have issue with policy enforcement. Though I am still wondering why I cannot power it up :( – Umer – 2016-03-31T05:16:39.707

@Umer That additional information should all be in your question text! – Jan Doggen – 2016-03-31T13:57:33.487