Re-enabling secure boot after trying out non-WHQL USB 3.1 drivers

Pejole2165 said:

You say your system is running in raid mode? Is this by design, as in you are running a RAID setup or is it like the RST drivers with Optane using a RAID like system? Must admit I don't know much about RAID...never trusted it. Is your disk GPT or MBR, has it changed when installing the USB drivers? I know in theory you should not be able to change from GPT to MBR without some technical wizardry. Sorry for the new questions but without the machine in front of me and not having installed these drivers myself (and really not willing to) I'm sort of blind here.
Also you probably have looked, but can you check Taskmanager, Startup tab and see what is enabled there?

Yes, it's by design but not because I run using the fake RAID onboard hardware. It's so that the RST driver feature set is fully installed but I do have two SSD's setup in a Storage Space with Simple configuration (which is the same as RAID0). Storage Space is like native Windows RAID. My disk is GPT and you're right that it's not that easy to change from GPT to MBR and a process as easy as installing drivers will not do that. No problem, I'm glad of the help I'm receiving here.

I checked Services (services.msc) earlier and found nothing there. I'll check Task Manager -> Startup later and see if I see something out of the ordinary.

Pejole2165 said:

How much data do you have on Storage space pool? Would it be worth deconstructing the Storage pool until you can sort out the secure boot issue, then reconstruct it after? If so follow this guide:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/...storage-spaces
This I would think would be a almost last resort, but may be worth trying, I know it will consume a lot of time.

What would it achieve though? How is it connected with the Intel USB drivers?

Right. I just don't understand how the USB install can interfere with the boot files. But hey, at this point you're right anything is possible. Disregarding secure boot though (keeping it disabled), I should still be able to delete/disable those device drivers.

Pejole2165 said:

Sorry that post wandered a bit, was on the phone to my daughter at the same time.
Is your BIOS set to RAID or AHCI for disk controller?
I'm assuming RAID to enable storage spaces to work, or is that not needed?

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When you enable secure boot, the system fails, the reason is those modded drivers are still used by the system and are incompatible with secure boot. Removing those drivers, or disabling them from loading causes a failure to boot as well. So they are listed in Windows as boot critical drivers.
A simple way to check this is to run a command (Powershell) to export the current drivers to a folder, the output of the command will list which drivers are boot critical.
Open elevated Powershell and enter "Export-WindowsDriver -Path C:\Windows -Destination D:\DriverBackup" without speech quotes and change drive letters accordingly, the output in the Powershell window will show all drivers exported and their boot critical status, you might be able to identify the problem driver this way. Once identified we can work on removing it.

My BIOS is set to RAID. This is not needed for Storage Spaces to work. I simply enable it because it has all the features of AHCI and is sort of a future proofing in case I need to use fake RAID in the future (so that I won't need to switch from AHCI to RAID).

I'm very comfortable with Powershell because I use it extensively at work to automate things. Instead of the Path switch (used for offline images), I used the Online switch so that it will get third-party drivers from the running Windows on the local computer.

Here's the resulting output from the command (exported to csv and saved/formatted to xlsx): Dropbox - results.xlsx - Simplify your life

Here are the driver backups: Dropbox - DriverBackup.zip - Simplify your life

From those results, I can only see 1 out of the 2 remaining Intel drivers:

C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\iusb3hcs.inf_amd64_b575930622f1a2e4\iusb3hcs.inf

Pejole2165 said:

Ok, that is listed as boot critical, which would explain the no boot device situation when you tried to remove it. That I think is the problem device you need to somehow remove...why it is boot critical is what we need to figure out. As far as I am aware you do not need USB drivers installed to boot windows under normal circumstances, Windows will boot and device manager will flag the USB system as unknown because no drivers have been installed, although Windows has built in USB drivers so unless you have a non standard implementation of USB it will all be installed at boot time / setup etc.
So this device you have identified is a non standard USB driver somehow hooked into the boot sequence which once again makes me wonder if the writer has used the AHCI controller to enhance USB speed.
Something to try if you want to risk it is, restart to safe mode, enter BIOS before Windows starts and change from RAID to AHCI the let Windows boot. In theory Windows should load the AHCI driver while in safe mode, if it does and you get to the desktop, try to remove that problem device, then re boot to normal mode and see if its gone for good. If that works you can then re boot and enter BIOS, turn on secure boot and see.
You already said you don't need RAID to use the MS storage systems so it shouldn't affect anything else.

While in safe mode and AHCI enabled, do I remove that boot-critical driver using Autoruns too?

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Nevermind, problem solved :)



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Hold on, let me summarized all the steps I did in case other find it helpful when in the same situation.