Bad Advice No Matter Where it Came From
Just a short post- in the “don’t do this at home” category.
I was recently asked to assist someone with another KMDF installation issue, and in this case, the Internet proved itself to be everything it shouldn’t be- a treasure trove of unchallenged bad advice.
I don’t care where you read it- deleting wdf01000.sys and wdfldr.sys from %windir%\system32\drivers of a machine is:
- So rarely necessary as a problem-solving step you shouldn’t even be thinking about doing it.
- Very likely to make things worse than they were before you started. If you are using any OS beginning with Windows Vista, it can turn your machine into an unusable paperweight, and you may find it very difficult to recover. Plus there are enough drivers in general use now even the earlier OS are not immune.
What I was looking at was a machine where someone attempted to “cure” a KMDF 1.5 installation issue this way [I was fortunate enough to have the entire setupapi.dev.log, so I could actually tell within a couple of hours when this was done]. On Windows Vista, no less- now doing that requires overriding system file protection, so it isn’t like we haven’t tried to save you from yourself. This particular user was very lucky- no boot devices using the framework [and this is the first Vista machine where I’ve ever seen this].
But once you’ve done this, you’ve given yourself one huge problem- none of the already installed drivers work, and no amount of reinstalling them is going to save you.
Why?
Because our coinstallers won’t even attempt to update an OS where KMDF is a part of the OS unless they were released AFTER the OS was. They don’t need to- it is already there, built-in.
Nobody’s driver is going to work after those files are deleted, until an update is applied. If your Vista machine has had the SP1 upgrade installed [and by now, the vast majority of them have], then it is using KMDF 1.7- if you delete our binaries then NOBODY can fix it for you, because that is the current released version [1.9 is still in Beta]. There is no driver on the market you can install that will fix this, because we haven’t given anyone a package that is capable of that.
The only cure is to find the right binaries and put them back where they belong. Then consider not taking advice from some internet blowhard [if you feel like considering me as one- hey, so be it- but I actually helped engineer the product, and that claim is verifiable- what’s your source’s claim of expertise based upon?].
My apologies for the tone here, but I track access to this blog, and I know “deleting wdf01000.sys” is a search term that pops me up. So maybe some advice here may save you a world of grief. There are better ways to solve your problem, whatever it is- even the problems where this was actually suggested as a “working” solution at one time.
Now Playing: Bob Kjelgaard- “Let’s Escape” (not available anywhere)- just me and my acoustic with a song a couple of my college buddies wrote [and I renamed, revised, and arranged]…
