win8 Driver not signed? It's a MS driver!

[-T- Member]

Happy to help. Had the same issue on a pc before and the adobe link was pretty much the steps I had to follow to fix it. Only got it from there on a quick google as I forgot the link I'd used before

[Shane Nokes]

Huh, sounds like some sort of CD writing program carried over then during the upgrade. Something like Nero or the like...that can cause the issue. Surprised the drive showed up in Device Manager in that case though...

[code65536]

Um, the driver date (and version) reported for MSFT drivers are worthless. It's merely a date that is reported in the driver's INF and means nothing. If you really want to know the driver's date, you need to look at the dates of the various .sys and other files installed by that driver.

For example, there are often hotfixes (many private hotfixes that you have to request via MSKB) that will update one of these "base" drivers. For example, something to fix a bug in USB or ATAPI or whatever. If you install that hotfix, the driver gets updated. But the INF-reported info in the device manager remains the same, still reports 2006, and all that jazz (I don't know why they don't change this, but whatever the case, it's entirely cosmetic and irrelevant).

On the same token, installing Intel's chipset INF "drivers" in most cases means absolutely nothing. Let's say you install Windows, and it installs Microsoft's generic USB drivers for your USB controller. Then you install Intel's chipset INF. But you're STILL using the exact same generic driver that came with Windows (since, in case people haven't noticed, Intel's chipset INF installer contains only INFs and doesn't actually have any drivers). So what do you get when you install Intel's chipset INF? Well, the name is prettified (instead of USB Controller, you'll get something like "Intel [insert long and convoluted chipset name here] USB Controller". And you'll get a different version number and date (since it's a different INF reporting different numbers), but the driver itself is exactly the same as before--it's an entirely cosmetic change.

The one and only situation where it makes sense to install Intel's chipset INF is if you have a device that isn't being detected properly. But if your device is detected and installed, the chipset INF does absolutely nothing other than cosmetically change some reported names, dates, and version numbers around.

Moral of the story: Stop confusing INF-reported dates and versions with actual driver dates and versions. The former might be accurate or it might be completely meaningless. The latter is much better. And no, none of these drivers are from 2006. And yes, many of these drivers get updated by WU or Service Packs (and needless to say, new OS releases), but you wouldn't know it if you only blindly follow whatever Device Manager says.

[Shane Nokes]

Nice to have you say that, and while part of it is correct, the rest isn't necessarily.

If for some reason the upgrade install went bad it could have corrupted the driver store and would have reported an older Windows version number if the INF files didn't get properly updated. That's why I was asking that question, to see if the files laid down by the install were corrupted, in which case a refresh wouldn't have helped much.

That was only step 1 in my troubleshooting. However it appears it was a case of the old upper/lower filters issue, just behaving differently than I've noticed in the past.

So this one is already solved. Also the Intel chipset installer software actually does update some of the driver files if need be if for instance a specific chipset isn't supported (due to release after OS is finalized). So to say that it's useless to install is incorrect. On older machines it may be useless to install since oftentimes the OS has a newer better driver already in the image, but not necessarily on newer machines moving forward.

[Noir Angel]

Moral of the story: A clean install is usually better than an in place upgrade