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maharmstone
Not working on Windows 10 x86 Stable
An external USB-3 2.5TB HDD containing an install of Fedora 34 Silverblue, which is accessible perfectly under Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with WinBtrfs/Btrfs does not populate volumes under Windows 10 Home 32-bit.
I tried the last 3 releases of the driver so far, but it reminded me of a situation in the early stages of WinBtrfs, namely that under a Windows 10 x86/32-bit somehow the .inf tried to install the 64-bit driver (similar to the behavior under Windows 7 64-bit where the x86-driver is installed, due to the host being 32-bit linked to a 64-bit kernel). I've seen this behavior with other (real hardware) device-drivers as well, where from Windows 10 20H1 on 64-bit drivers are installed without throwing an error although the whole system is 32-bit. This happens mostly on Atom/Celeron-based SoCs from Baytrail upwards.
@maharmstone could you provide steps to collect information that helps you/us to determine what the reason is and to find a solution? If i remember correctly earlier versions had separate .inf-files or maybe i modified it to make it work, but that was a long time ago (i used Fedora on these devices for a while), so any hint will be helpful.
Thank you!
If you suspect that Windows is installing the sys file for the wrong architecture, the first thing I'd do is check the filesize of C:\Windows\System32\drivers\btrfs.sys, and see which file in the zip file it matches up to.
Also, what does sc start btrfs say?
@maharmstone I compared the properties of C:\Windows\System32\drivers\btrfs.sys (after installing the latest release-version 1.7.9 via the provided .inf-file again) with the ones provided in the .zip in \x86 and \x64 folders and indeed the correct version for 32-bit/x86 was installed.
In PowerShell (Administrative) sc start btrfs didn't return anything, although it seemed to process the command. After switching to cmd inside that PowerShell ...
PS C:\Windows\system32> sc start btrfs
PS C:\Windows\system32> cmd
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19044.1288]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>sc start btrfs
[SC] StartService FAILED 577:
Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this file. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged, or that might be malicious software from an unknown source.
I checked then if the Digital Signature was active on btrfs.sys in System32, as i remembered checking the "Always trust ..."-checkbox appearing on first install and accepting it. The signature is given and is still valid.
On a sidenote: How would i go for complete removal of the installed files and signature to prevent errors from leftovers to try out other versions?
[Edit] Additional Information / Reasoning:
@maharmstone The example-machine that is affected by this is a Windows Convertible/2-in-1 with Intel(R) Atom(TM) x5-Z8350 CPU @ 1.44GHz Quad-Core SoC. RAM is just 2GiB, free space on the internal emmc is 2GiB, but i reserved a 4480MiB partition for experiments. The CPU is 64-bit, BIOS is UEFI 32-bit. I have at the moment besides that a AMD Phenom 9600b Desktop with Windows 10 Professional Stable 64-bit and Visual Studio 2019 Community with 8 GiB RAM, as well as a Intel Core i7 2nd Gen (Sandy Bridge) Notebook with Windows 11 Stable and Visual Studio 2022 Community and 16GiB RAM available, both Quad-Cores. If it turns out that it was not just a dumb failure due to ignorance on my end or a simple misconfiguration i am willed to use these resources to build and test patched versions if you are able to provide guidance. - My main target is to run Windows from btrfs on these Intel Atom SoC Convertibles, since NTFS is the only thing that makes them hickup every once in a while. I am also hoping for running a 64-bit version of Windows using Quibble to overcome the UEFI-32. The latter would allow to run Windows 11. Tests with older versions of Windows from btrfs as already successfully driven by other users would be on the menu, too. I am open to any hints and experiments.