If you are trying to get old trusted hardware working under Windows 8, or other hardware were no signed drivers have been created by the manufacturer yet, you may have troubles getting the hardware to be recognized by the Windows 8 operating system correctly.
Sometimes you may be lucky and third parties have stepped in to create signed drivers, or the manufacturer eventually will come through to create and distribute a signed driver for the operating system.
Up until then though you can try and install an unsigned driver to get the hardware working under Windows 8. The only problem is that it is not really that simple anymore to load unsigned drivers.
You need to load the driver during the start of the system. Here are the instructions to load unsigned drivers in Windows 8.
- Make sure you are signed in
- Press Windows-I to load the Charms Bar
- Click on Power, hold down the Shift-key, and click on Restart to restart the PC
- You should see a troubleshooting page come up. Click on Troubleshoot here, and on the next page on Advanced options.
- Here you find several options, including automatic repair, system image recovery and startup settings. Click on the latter to change the startup behavior of the Windows 8 operating system and click on Restart again on the next page
- Here you should see an advanced menu with nine different startup options. Press 7 or F7 to disable the driver signature enforcement. Windows 8 should restart the system automatically and the drivers that you have installed or are about to install should be working from that moment on.
