Anyone know how to permanently remove a NVMe driver that was installed in one of the updates? I don't wanna roll back the whole update but I don't want the OS to see a certain drive. Uninstalling the driver in Device Manager doesn't seem to do anything.
HI BD
I dont think a windows update installed that driver, W7 has never directly supported that type of drive.
you could uncheck the update drivers part of WU
i would think its a firmware update from the manaufacturer..... check your Task Scheduler for it
dont know what your running on that drive, but if its a linux brand the only way i suspect you can hide it is via a dual boot option
That's what I'm doing, plus making it offline in Disk mgmt. But there's still nothing preventing a ransomware from turning it back on and messing with it. It was better before when it couldn't even know the drive exists.
Apparently NVMe support is part of KB3125574 but I don't want to uninstall the whole update over this, there's gotta be a way to get rid of just the NVMe driver
Download Autoruns, go to File and save the ARN file. Zip the ARN file and upload here and I'll have a look. Does this driver or device have a unique name?
Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs
This sounds terribly similar to an XY problem (you ask about your attempt instead of asking about your real problem). Why do you even want to remove a driver for a device that you're still using? Or if you're no longer using it, why have the thing attached to your computer? It doesn't makes sense to me.
It seems like you want to uninstall the driver to "protect" the hard drive contents. This is a bad approach for a security problem.
The very first barrier a malware would be stopped is permissions. Windows has a very strong security system in place, so use it. Deny your user access to critical files, and allow administrators-only access. Malware would need to achieve administrator privilege scalation to tamper with anything. Deny read access to admins and you're pretty much locked the files from anyone (this is the same trick the service user "trustedinstaller" does).
BTW, once the malware has achieved admin access, you've already lost. If you use a proper permissions system the malware can always give itself permissions, if it's intelligent enough. If you uninstall the drivers malware can always reinstall them.
But again, I ask, what's your real problem here?
Another idea is to downgrade your primary account and use the builtin admin account for elevated access. That's what I always do.
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