HWiNFO Kernel Driver service failed to start / Cannot install the HWiNFO driver

[geogan]

I was trying to run third party tool OCCT and it kept disappearing straight after starting. Looked in Windows Event Log and see this error every time:

The HWiNFO Kernel Driver (v174) service failed to start due to the following error:
Access is denied.



So I tried to run latest version of HWiNFO



and it when I hit Start I get...



What's going on? I don't have anything strange running in Windows 10 all up to date patches.

I haven't tried running HWiNFO in a long time, but normally run OCCT memory checking.

On Ryzen 5950X on X570 ASUS Hero VIII motherboard

I don't run ANY third party anti-virus or anything like that, and as i said OCCT definitely worked in last year. Also no idea why OCCT is using HWiNFO driver.

 

[Martin]

This is really strange as when nothing else is running that might be blocking HWiNFO there should be no problem.
First try to reboot the computer. If that won't help please enable Debug Mode in HWiNFO and attach the HWiNFO64.DBG file it produced.

 

[Martin]

Are you running as Administrator and getting the UAC prompt when you start HWiNFO?
Perhaps try to enable the "Persistent Driver" option in main settings of HWiNFO if that will help.

 

[geogan]

Are you running as Administrator and getting the UAC prompt when you start HWiNFO?
Perhaps try to enable the "Persistent Driver" option in main settings of HWiNFO if that will help.

Thanks to the debug log, I figured it out.... seems files in my \AppData\Local\Temp folder were encrypted using EFS... and for some reason this was blocking the writing into the folder.

I attempted to un-encrypt entire Temp folder - it threw a load of errors about not being able to for a lot of files, but most did... and now I can run HWiNFO. The other program OCCT also started up now too.

I also see similar error in Windows event viewer about..

The AsusCertService service failed to start due to the following error:
Access is denied.

Which still seems to be happening, but that's another problem most likely same reason.

 

[Martin]

Wow, interesting