Enable test signing in Vista and Windows 7

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, with the default settings, we can’t install unsigned third party drivers. We need to enable test signing to install such drivers. We can enable this from command prompt using the below command.

bcdedit /set testsigning on

Note that you can run above command only from elevated administrator command prompt. Otherwise you will get error as shown below.

c:\>bcdedit /set testsigning on
The boot configuration data store could not be opened.
Access is denied.

See How to open elevated command prompt

After running the above command, you can verify that test signing is enabled by looking at the boot loader settings which can be retrieved by running ‘bcdedit‘ command.

C:\>bcdedit
Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {8d354cb4-d349-11e0-be61-5cff35092b52}
displayorder            {current}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 30

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \Windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows 7
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {8d354cb6-d349-11e0-be61-5cff35092b52}
recoveryenabled         Yes
testsigning             Yes
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \Windows
resumeobject            {8d354cb4-d349-11e0-be61-5cff35092b52}
nx                      OptIn
C:\>

To disable test signing you can run the below command

bcdedit /set testsigning off