Solved How to prevent driver from loading at boot or to service Win7 offline

[leb7]

I hope these forums are still read by enough knowledgeable people... my issue is with a Win 7 install, but I suppose it could apply to any kind of Windows version.
Ok, so I bricked my Windows install by installing a SATA driver for a PCIe eSATA card, and I think that it also messed with my onboard SATA chipset to which my boot drive is connected. I now get a BSOD on boot when loading that driver. Additionnaly, my drive is encrypted, so when getting a command prompt from the Startup Repair environement, I cannot read the drive content.

Safe boot (configured with bcdedit from startup repair) fails as well (same BSOD when loading the sata driver)

I can however access the boot drive by plugging into an external enclosure and software decrypt it on another machine. I know which driver is the culprit. So, I would like to remove it or replace it with a working version. But I assume there is more to it than just modifying the content of \Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\asstahci64.inf_amd64_neutral_30c4790c3b822e82

I also found out you can load the registry from that other windows install by doing Load Hive in regedit, but that's as fas as I went. I don't know what needs to be modified where to either :

• change the driver files for asstahci64 and registry references to a version that I know worked before
• somehow edit the config and registry to avoid loading this driver at boot

Even though I know I am at no risk of losing data (no personal data is on that boot drive), I would still like to try everything possible before having to reinstall Windows, because there is a good decade of usage and look-and-feel config that I forgot how I managed to get to...

Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.

 

[SIW2]

1. check in system32\config\regback folder . If there are copies of the hives in there from before the problem you can copy them from system32\config\regback to system32\config ( rename the existing hives first to avoid overwriting)

OR

If you have restore point from before you installed the bad driver you could do a system restore


OR

you could just copy out the system32\config folder from a shadow copy ( which is created you make a restore point ) .
Then rename the the system32\config folder on the sick disk to someting like config-bad .
Then copy the config folder you salvaged from the shadow copy into sick disk \windows\system32

you can view and copy things out of shadow copies easily with a tiny portable free program ShadowCopyView - Shadow copy viewer for Windows 10/8/7/Vista


otherwise

1. Rt click the system hive and select copy. Rt click in the same config folder and select paste so you now have system - copy as a backup

2. load the system hive in a registry editor and search for the culprit

just for illustration using ambakdrv as an example:

service start type change to 4 to disable

Dble click on it
change it to 4
ok




if there is a filter remove it but if there are other filters delete only the culprit leaving the others there

 

[leb7]

Thank you so much for the quick and detailed that is giving me hope.

1. check in system32\config\regback folder . If there are copies of the hives in there from before the problem you can copy them from system32\config\regback to system32\config ( rename the existing hives first to avoid overwriting)

Indeed, there is a backup from 4 days before the issue. It contains :

DEFAULT
SAM
SECURITY
SOFTWARE
SYSTEM

however, one file that is in the current config folder is not present in the regback folder : COMPONENTS ; can I leave it as is?
Also, if I can copy the 5 files above, should I do anything with the *.LOG1 files that are present in the current config folder?
thanks again

- - - Updated - - -

It worked! Simply copied all hives from regbak folder back into config (all done from another machine), plugged it back in and booted fine. Tank you so much!

 

[SIW2]

T
It worked! Simply copied all hives from regbak folder back into config (all done from another machine), plugged it back in and booted fine. Tank you so much!

well done