Why won't Windows accept a driver that worked a few weeks ago?

[Jaap Verhage]

Hello everyone,

this will be a rather lengthy post. Please bear with me, as I don't know what information is pertinent to my problem and what isn't.
I have a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop which has been running 64-bits Windows 10 satisfactorily for quite some time now. However, its original 250 GB hard disk was rather slow, small, getting old and throwing up file system errors a bit too frequently to my liking. So I decided to try to move some disk-intensive Windows functionality onto another medium, like a USB flash drive or a memory card. That's no problem with the Temp directory and ReadyBoost, but if you want to put the page file or the search index onto it, you have to find a way to fool Windows into believing that the medium is permanent instead of removable. Various drivers exist that claim to do this, and after a lot of experimenting, I thought I had it figured out with the filter driver cfadisk.sys, originating from Hitachi. What I did, was:
- from an elevated command prompt:
bcdedit /set nointegritychecks on
bcdedit /set loadoptions ddisable_integrity_checks
bcdedit /set testsigning on
- reboot with shift-restart
- choose option 7 from the startup menu to disable enforcing driver signature checking
- install the driver
- reboot and see the driver working as advertised, without further ado.
Wonderful!

But then, the hard disk started making trouble, even more frequent file system errors, bad sectors cropping up. It got so bad that I got the message "Missing operating system" at startup, at which point I realized that something was seriously amiss. Luckily, I had a fairly recent backup. So I went and got myself a shiny new 2 TB disk, installed it and restored the backup onto it. No go; the restore went fine, but the PC wouldn't even consider starting up, just showing me a blank screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. After x tries, I gave up and took the laptop to a PC shop, where they emptied the new disk of all its contents and put a clean Win 10 install on it. Back home, I backed that up in case of further trouble. I decided that the recent backup I used earlier was probably corrupt. I then restored an older backup from the broken-down disk, hoping that that one wouldn't be corrupt. It wasn't, and after a few hours I was back in business, wit a MUCH bigger disk .
But. Since then, I haven't been able to get the filter driver to work! As far as I know, I'm doing exactly the same things I did before, but Windows will not accept the unsigned driver unless I disable driver signature checking with option 7 from the startup menu every time I boot. Obviously, that's not acceptable, ands the BCDEDIT commands should take care of that. If I examine the BCD, the settings are alle there: no integrity checking and so on. So I'm wondering what, if anything, may have changed in my laptop, apart from the new disk, or what, if anything, may have changed in Windows. Some update that enforces driver signature checking even more rigorously than before, perhaps? I don't think it's the PC's BIOS; there is an option to boot in UEFI mode, but there's no Secure boot possibility, so that could not be the problem. And I've always used the Legacy BIOS mode and am still doing that. Also, I've read that Windows 10, when cleanly installed, won't accept unsigned drivers, but that Windows 10, upgraded from a previous Windows version, will. The registry tells me that "my" Windows 10 is an upgrade from Windows 7, which has indeed happened somewhere back in 2015.

So - I'm stymied. Any ideas? I'd like to get that driver working again. I'm not waiting for advice like "Don't mess with unsigned drivers", but if you MUST give it, feel free to do so .

Regards, Jaap.

 

[Jaap Verhage]

Well. it seems I've out-asked the experrts... not one reply in over two months. Is it really such a difficult question? No ideas at all, anyone?

 

[kemical]

Hi Jaap,

sorry I missed your original post. (spending too much time playing Warframe)

I've read about this unsigned driver issue before and wondered does it help if you try and install them as administrator?

Have you checked for a different version of the driver?

 

[Jaap Verhage]

Hi Kemical,

thanks for replying. As to your questions: I have installed the driver as administrator and there are no more recent versions. So no hel;p there, I'm afraid.

 

[Scotty369]

Not sure I can help but here goes: the first part I recognize as I had one of two 500 GB drives in my Asus N76V start getting corrupt sectors which caused a lot of files to get corrupt headers and finally caused boot errors. I finally got it running after about 25 attempts and immediately offloaded all data to my PC. later it completely died with a blank screen. Ended up taking it ti a repair shop and the graphics section of the mobo had died, so that explained the blank screen and the disk with the C drive was definitely corrupt even though I'd repaired it, it didn't hold and replaced it with Intel 180 Gb SSD.
Now the driver problem: I suspect their might be remnants in the registry that are causing the problem. I'd trace all occurrences of it in the registry after deleting driver, and delete registry records and reboot and clean registry. If you haven't tried, you might delete driver, clean the registry with a good cleaner, something stronger than CCleaner, like Mace for example and reinstall and retry. If that doesn't work then use first method to delete all traces, do a registry clean, then try again.
I've often found that many problems are solved by taking some time to root out leftovers in the registry. Most of the time these leftovers are harmless, but then as the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, mostly harmless. Cheers.

 

[Jaap Verhage]

[...]
Now the driver problem: I suspect their might be remnants in the registry that are causing the problem. I'd trace all occurrences of it in the registry after deleting driver, and delete registry records and reboot and clean registry. If you haven't tried, you might delete driver, clean the registry with a good cleaner, something stronger than CCleaner, like Mace for example and reinstall and retry. If that doesn't work then use first method to delete all traces, do a registry clean, then try again.
I've often found that many problems are solved by taking some time to root out leftovers in the registry. Most of the time these leftovers are harmless, but then as the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, mostly harmless. Cheers.

Hi Scotty, thanks for replying! I cleaned up the registry thoroughly, by editing it offline, and removing all traces of the driver before trying to re-install it. But that didn't help.

 

[Scotty369]

If you've gone through the cleanout process then it pretty well only leaves some incompatibility with the driver and the Windows upgrade I suspect. I've never had much luck any time I tried to use BCDEdit so the issue might lie there. It's a tough one for sure. Cheers.

 

[Jaap Verhage]

If you've gone through the cleanout process then it pretty well only leaves some incompatibility with the driver and the Windows upgrade I suspect. I've never had much luck any time I tried to use BCDEdit so the issue might lie there. It's a tough one for sure. Cheers.

I'll keep on trying now and then to see if anything's changed. You never can tell.

 

[Legit Labs]

Hello Jaap,

It sounds like you're probably running Windows 10 or Windows 8. Microsoft no longer allows for unsigned programs to run for security reasons. I believe this first started in Windows 8, and it's why you should be finding less malware on your computer these days, as malware would get onto your computer by being an unsigned program at startup.

There may be two ways you can go about solving this: either by signing the driver or by disabling the signed driver enforcement.

Hope that helps!

 

[Jaap Verhage]

Hello Legit Labs,

thanks for your reply. I'm afraid it won't help, however: signing the driver is not something a run-of-the-mill user like me can do, and disabling the signed driver enforcemnent is something I already did, as noted in my original post. But thanks for trying!

 

[nmsuk]

So lets get this right, you're having hard disk errors so you're offloading work onto usb/flash memory. Why not just replace the drive?

 

[Jaap Verhage]

So lets get this right, you're having hard disk errors so you're offloading work onto usb/flash memory. Why not just replace the drive?

Hello nmsuk, i already did that, as stated in my original post.