Windows mouse driver files not digitally signed

mikelee101 · 05 Oct 2011

Hello,
I'm at my wits end. Anyone who can help would be my hero.

Acer 5253 laptop, Win7 Home Premium 64bit SP1, AMD C-50.

Trying to use a USB mouse. I have 3 logitech mice. None work because hidclass.sys and hidusb.sys are not digitally signed. If I f8 and disable driver signing enforcement, all 3 mice work, so I'm pretty certain that's the issue.

Tried "Update Driver" via device manager. Windows determined that I already had the best driver and wouldn't do anything.

Logitech does not furnish drivers for Win7. They rely on the native drivers.

Acer does not furnish mouse drivers. They refer you to the manufacturer of the mouse.

Tried copying the files in question from a 64bit machine that showed them to be digitally signed. Renamed the ones on my machine and pasted the ones from the "good" machine. Resolved nothing.

chkdsk /r found problems and repaired them. Didn't help.

sfc /scannow found problems that it could not resolve. Looked in CBS.log and found no references to either of the sys files in question. No resolution.

System Restore only had one restore point, and it was from 2 days ago. Problem was already noticed by then. I suspect that it's been this way since I purchased the laptop a couple of months ago anyway, but if there had been a restore point back at the very beginning, I'd have tried that.

I don't know much about digital signing of drivers. I've seen in a couple of threads that I might be able to sign the drivers myself, but haven't been able to find out the actual steps to do so. I'll keep looking, but if that's the best solution, please post a link if you have one. Is the digital signature part of the driver file itself? Or is it another file? If so, where's that file? Or is it a registry entry? If so, can I manipulate that to resolve the problem?

I'm going nuts. I miss XP. All I want to do is use the simplest of all plug and play devices. It's been about 3 weeks and I still can't get win7 to cooperate. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

zigzag3143 · 05 Oct 2011

Mike

Obviously many more problems than just the mouse driver.

You can use earlier drivers (ie from vista, or even XP) if you install them in compatibility mode
[right click the installer>properties>compatibility>chose OS]

The other system problems need a repair install.

Corazon · 06 Oct 2011

I agree as to the other problems, but I don't think driver signing is much to worry about. The drivers seem to work just fine for you apart from not being digitally signed, if I understand you correctly?
What surprises me a bit is that hidclass.sys and hidusb.sys are files from Microsoft and part of Windows, so it seems odd that it would complain about these not being signed...
As far as I know, digital signatures are always part of the file, not a separate file or registry entry or even an alternate NTFS stream (if you don't know what that is, don't worry about it).

Can you try running /sfc scannow again to see if it can fix any problems this time?

mikelee101 · 06 Oct 2011

Thanks zigzag.
A couple of questions about a repair install. This machine didn't come with an OS cd like my xp machines did. It prompted me to burn some cds when we first booted it up. However, if the os install was corrupt from the beginning, then might the cds I burned be bad as well? If so, is there an online installer package that I might download somewhere?

I figure that might be the best place to start and see if it fixes everything at once.

Thanks again for the help.

Mike

zigzag3143 · 06 Oct 2011

mikelee101 said:

Thanks zigzag.
A couple of questions about a repair install. This machine didn't come with an OS cd like my xp machines did. It prompted me to burn some cds when we first booted it up. However, if the os install was corrupt from the beginning, then might the cds I burned be bad as well? If so, is there an online installer package that I might download somewhere?

I figure that might be the best place to start and see if it fixes everything at once.

Thanks again for the help.

Mike

You were asked to burn cd's so that the virgin system state would be saved. You may still be able to do a restore to factory state.

There is no online installer but I do think you are correct that with as many problems as you seem to have a clean install would be the fastest way to rid yourself of all of them