Saturday 24 October 2009

Disable Driver Signature Enforcement - Cisco PI21AG

I've got a Cisco PI21AG WiFi PCI NIC card for my media box PC. Cisco don't supply a driver for the 64bit Windows 7 in the final release version. However there was a Microsoft driver in the W7 beta which worked perfectly (but taken out in RC and RTM versions of W7). After installing the release version of W7-64 I just installed the driver that had come with the Beta.

Problem is the "driver signature enforcement" is invalid so the driver won't load. Although this can be disabled by pressing F8 each time the PC boots and selecting the "disable enforcement" option, this is tedious so I Googled and tried this:
  1. Run command prompt as administrator.
  2. bcdedit -set loadoptions DDISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
This did NOT WORK. Apparently it does work on some versions of Vista, but who cares Vista is a waste of time.

Seemed dodgy, but I then tried this:


Basically its a case of switching the OS to a driver developer "test mode" and then applying a sort of "self signing" to the driver in question. So by going into Device Manager and selecting the device, properties, driver tab, driver details - I can see it is athrx.sys which is not signed.

So using the app I applied both these steps and rebooted. Worked great - No more F8 and I can keep using my expensive bulletproof Cisco Wifi NIC on the Media Box PC.

3 comments:

  1. Hi, can you link to the W7 beta driver. I'm just trying to upgrade to W7 64-bit myself.

    Cheers - Akeel

    ReplyDelete
  2. Similar request for me! Please provide link to the W7 beta driver. Can't find it anywhere..

    ric

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  3. your steps is really helpful. i like this post and i feel very happy to read this article...
    thanks for sharing...
    more info:- Cisco Router Support


    ReplyDelete