How to test sign a driver in Windows 7 or 8 with your own certificate

Do you want to test a new driver? Here’s how you can sign your own drivers in Windows 7 or 8.

When Windows 7 complains that Windows requires a digitally signed driver, you can try this.

1. Read this tutorial to enable test mode and disable digital driver signing for a little background

2. Basically, you need to enter this command into an elevated command prompt to enable the test mode:

bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING ON

Create Certificate And Sign Driver With It

3. Copy your driver to a directory like C:\test

4. Open the Windows SDK Shell from your Start Menu (MicrosoftSDKs)

5. Create a self signed certificate for your PC by entering makecert -r -ss PrivateCertStore -n “CN=EnterName” (replace EnterName with a name)

6. Enter signtool sign -s PrivateCertStore -n “entername” C:\test\mydriver.sys (replace entername with the name from step 4)

ENLARGE IMAGE

IMPORTANT: If you don’t replace entername with the actual name of your own certificate (step 5) then you will get the error:

SignTool Error: No certificates were found that met all the given criteria

If you want to test sign drivers in Windows 8, you need to install the Windows 8 Developer tools (If I remember correctly it was optional to install them, so you might have to reinstall them before you can test sign a driver in Windows 8)