Greets,
Thanks for the nice tutorial!

A Few Queries Please :
( Provided : All the things are well with the driver except it is unsigned! )

It seems the only problem with unsigned drivers occurs during booting / startup. Isn't it ?

Not all the drivers load during the boot, right ? So, is it possible that the driver is not signed, is not loaded during the startup / boot & comes into play a little further without any difficulty ? Plug & Play or something else, Any possibility ?

Thanks. ...

Hello @Vineet Garg,

The driver not being signed is one reason why it may not load during startup.

It also depends on the device and the driver for if it's needed at startup or not, and any possible issues (ex: corrupted) with the driver.

Brink said:

Hello @Vineet Garg,

The driver not being signed is one reason why it may not load during startup.

It also depends on the device and the driver for if it's needed at startup or not, and any possible issues (ex: corrupted) with the driver.

Greets,

Thanks for the quick response, the things are clearer now!

But sorry I did not put the query well. So, one more chance!

Condition : The driver is all good every way but its not signed, the driver is not needed to load at startup / boot & Driver Signature Enforcement is Enabled.

Now,
I am trying to install it. So, what will happen exactly ? how the enforcement will come into play ? Will it stop the installation itself ? Will the device work at all ?

Thanks. ...

Vineet Garg said:

Greets,

Thanks for the quick response, the things are clearer now!

But sorry I did not put the query well. So, one more chance!

Condition : The driver is all good every way but its not signed, the driver is not needed to load at startup / boot & Driver Signature Enforcement is Enabled.

Now,
I am trying to install it. So, what will happen exactly ? how the enforcement will come into play ? Will it stop the installation itself ? Will the device work at all ?

Thanks. ...

Usually, it will not allow the unsigned driver to be installed unless driver signature enforcement is disabled for you to be in Test Mode.

Brink said:

Usually, it will not allow the unsigned driver to be installed unless driver signature enforcement is disabled for you to be in Test Mode.

Thanks, now everything is quite clear!

Regards. ...

h9090 said:

Hi, brink! First, I would like to thank you for your content.

Recently I was researching about the xbox 360 receivers and why there are reports about the new version of windows 10, 2004, breaking their functionality. I have one dongle myself and wanted to play some games. I have been waiting for the problem to fix itselft through a new update for quite a while now, but nothing has changed. The old usual fix (manual installation of the driver through device manager) stopped working a couple weeks back.

So I found a video on youtube saying that apparently my dongle is from a third party and that is why they stopped working. This was news to me since I thought it was original (I have it for many years now). Anyway, the youtube video taught me how to disable the driver digital signature enforcement through test mode and how to install the driver and revert back out of test mode. The driver installed was downloaded from the microsoft website and the video showed how to edit the file xusb21.inf on notepad to simply change the ID of the product to 0291. So I know that there is nothing malicious about this driver. However, this process removes the digital signing of the driver.

You mentioned if I enable the driver signature enforcement, the installed unsigned driver would stop functioning. So, after installing in test mode and reverting back (comand: bcdedit.exe /set testsigning off), I was worried about security and started to wonder if the enforcement was really at work, since the driver was functioning well. I tried using the command bcdedit.exe to look the options "nointegritychecks" and "testsigning" to see if they were classified as "no" and they were. I tried the commands: "bcdedit.exe /set nointegritychecks off" and
"bcdedit.exe -set loadoptions DENABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS" which were completed succesfully.

But when I tried to execute the file xusb21.inf again, nothing happened. Didnt get a warning like before when I tried to install it without entering test mode. To see if it was actually doing something I tried through prompt with the command: "pnputil -a c:\[...]\xusb21.inf" and to my surprise the driver was "installed" succesfully. And I wasnt in test mode. So, I tried unnistalling the driver through device manager and after restarting my computer I tried to install the driver again. Them I got the error message and I had to do all the process again to install the driver.

My guess is that the enforcement is indeed working after the unsigned driver instalation and the driver works after reverting back from test mode. And the reason the xusb21.inf file "installs" without a warning is because this specific driver is already installed. I wonder if I tried to install another unsigned driver the enforcement would work. What are your thoughts about this?

Is there another way to check if the enforcement is indeed active?

Thanks in advance!

Hello h9090, and welcome to Ten Forums.

It should normally prevent you from installing any unsigned driver that's not already installed while not in Test Mode.

You can run the bcdedit command in an elevated command prompt to check if the nointegritychecks entry shows Yes (on - disabled) or No (off - enabled). If there isn't a nointegritychecks entry, then it's the same as enabled.