OK, so recently I had this annoying issue where Windows 11 Security centre was showing me that Memory integrity due to Incompatible drivers cannot be enabled.
I restarted a few times, but each time I was unable to toggle this on. It was either greyed out, or it just refused to toggle (and stick). I could see that this was due to a particular driver (WDCSAM64_prewin8.sys).
I’m no expert, but in essence, I believe this is due to an older/stale driver that has some how installed itself (via pnp?) and is causing a vulnerability. When I checked through the screen initially, I could see I was having an incompatibility with Western Digital. The driver itself was WDCSAM64_prewin8.sys
In this short post, I’m going to detail how I fixed it.
The Fix
Run an elevated command prompt (CMD or Powershell as Admin) and type the following command:
Command 1
pnputil /enum-drivers
This basically gets a list of plug and play driver on your system. Copy and paste this full list into a text or word document. Do a search for the offending driver. In my case, searching WD, brought up the following:
Published Name: oem22.inf
Original Name: wdcsam.inf
Provider Name: Western Digital Technologies
Class Name: WD Drive Management devices
Class GUID: {8496e87e-c0a1-4102-9d8d-bd9a9b8b07a9}
Driver Version: 11/30/2017 1.2.0.0
Signer Name: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher
If you see the driver version, you can see it’s from 2017. I am not saying that’s the way to identify something that’s troublesome, but it made me think this was definitely the issue. An alternative location to find the driver, is on the initial error screen at the bottom where it says “published name”. I still wanted to manually find the driver in the list though just to be sure. Once I located the driver amongst the others, it was time to remove it.
Command 2
In order to remove this driver, I then entered the following command:
pnputil /delete-driver oem22.inf /uninstall /force /reboot
(notice I needed to use oem22.inf i.e. the published name). As long as you’re admin (elevated) this command should work.
Restart the pc, and within a few moments, you should be up and running again!
If there’s anything else out there that people are looking at or you think I should be looking at, let me know in the comments or come and chat over in our facebook group!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/386238285944105
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