Saturday 22 February 2014

How to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement in Windows 8

Here's a quick post on how to disable the signature check for drivers in Windows 8 and allow unsigned drivers to be installed.

You might want to do this if a vendor's driver hasn't been signed, which I had to do for an old Tektronix Phaser 7700 printer; or if you are trying to load a modified driver, such as the HP 5590 ScanJet driver modified for 4500 ScanJet hardware, as described in another post at TheConstantMeddler.

If you attempt to In Windows 8 you are no longer prompted when attempting to install unsigned drivers, instead the driver installation fails silently or retries in an endless loop. Disabling driver signature enforcement requires restarting Windows 8, and then the ability to install unsigned drivers lasts until the next restart.

On to the procedure...

Show charms by moving cursor to screen top right, click Settings -> Change PC Settings -> General -> 'Restart Now' under Advanced Startup

Choose 'Troubleshoot'
Then 'Advanced Options'
'Startup Settings'
And click 'Restart' (we're almost there!)
Now press 7 to startup with Driver Signature Enforcement disabled.
That's it. Now when you attempt to install an unsigned driver you should get a prompt like below allowing you to install.

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