More wins using unsigned drivers...
As you may have seen before, I have spent much effort in the past on learning how to sign my own drivers and get these installed in windows.
Recently, I had to do the same again. I was building a computer for downstairs using "spare parts" (this is in quotes since this is actually a VERY long story spanning 2007 to 2010 and sort of sad too). Well the motherboard I ended up using has sound on it, but not digital audio.
I had an extra soundblaster live sitting around that I was hoping to use so that I could get a nice digital signal from the machine to my stereo.
Well, apparently I am WAY behind the times since these are now only in the ARCHIVE section on creative's download site. My new machine is of course 64 bit, which means I needed 64 bit drivers and this device was old enough that windows did not support it natively.
To my surprise, Creative actually does provide a software installer for 64 bit drivers if I select windows 7 as the OS. I thought this was going to be easy. I was wrong.
It turns out that their installer has all the drivers hidden away inside and that additionally they are not signed. Right away, this is an error on Creative's part. If I select win7 64 bit, either A. They need to NOT provide me with an installer that has unsigned drivers, or B. Provide me with actually signed drivers. They claim that they pass the windows driver bench, so they should get a cert for that, but Creative just did not want to include the right version I guess. Not too much I can do to correct their error though.
Well, that means my only solution is to break out the article I wrote before. The first hard part was just getting the drivers out. I had to use the program called 7Zip to open the self-extracting EXE file and find the driver package. Then as I wrote, create the CAT file, and then sign both it and all the drivers in the folder too.
Sure enough, that worked and I have sound on that machine. I am only writing an additional note here to keep the idea fresh in the search engines in case others stumble on this. (The previous article is the most read blog post I have ever posted according to my Graffiti Blogging Engine, so it must be reaching some people.)
Creative, would it hurt you to just sign the darn drivers you release? Really?
J.P.
