The Virtual Finger

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

No not the middle finger… Those who are keen followers of the articles pages here might have seen my little refugee item-ette from a forthcoming PC Pro feature: for those who haven’t, I confess my fragile ego wants me toshow it to you. Not because I took the photos all on my own (though I did, with my Sony with the busted CF door sensor that drives me nuts) but because I’ve just been through a bodge cycle on the HP ML115 that gave me the giggles.

I now find out of course, that VMWare Server isn’t officially supported on Windows Server 2008. Beta 2.0 is but that’s a whole different world, and I need Bowie, Iggy and friends to run without hassle. Searching in the usual places produces a load of whingers who don’t see why it can’t work, and almost nobody who really has the inside track…

…and one completely crazy fix. The problem is, Windows Sever 2008 won’t run with unsigned drivers, unless you press F8 on startup and choose the option which – well, runs without checking driver signing. There is no way to automate this within Windows: you can automate the opposite, so it never runs an unsigned driver: but you can’t turn the check off.

Well, unless you use ReadyDriverPlus that is. It’s not so much the need for somethign like this: it’s how it does it. Registry patch? Nah. Group Policy template? uh-uh.

It stuffs the keyboard buffer in the pre-GUI startup phase, to push in an F8 and the required number of up-arrows (plus a return) to always start server 2008 in unsigned driver mode.

How mad is that?

(and it works too…)