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In Windows 7 during Installation Setup one could press F8 and Force Unsigned Driver installation.

When I try to press F8 during Windows 10 setup nothing happens.

How can I enable installation of unsigned driver during Windows 10 Setup?

Almost all guides on the internet refer to a situation where Windows 10 is already installed. That's not what I am looking for.

I want to select or push such an option during clean install of Windows 10 i.e. by some means instruct Windows 10 installer during clean installation process to disable Driver Signature Enforcement.

Is this possible?

In Windows 7 setup it was easy. Just press F8 and select that option during clean installer setup.

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  • Just a quick sanity check: What type of hardware is the driver for? Is it something that must be installed to enable installing Windows 10? Microsoft may have a good reason for removing this option from Windows 10's installer.
    – Romen
    Commented Jan 9, 2020 at 16:00

3 Answers 3

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The only unsigned driver that might be needed during installation might be the storage controller driver. If it is missing you will get promoted during the installation process: https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/hard-disk-not-detected.html

Other drivers have to be installed afterwards or manually included into the installation package. Not sure the second one can be done without an enterprise license.

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  • Could perhaps try to boot into advanced mode after booting into Windows - lifewire.com/…
    – xpkiro
    Commented Sep 27, 2018 at 18:14
  • @JoshMcMullin, that's a good suggestion! However, please keep in mind that in the original question, the OP said "Almost all guides on the internet refer to a situation where Windows 10 is already installed. That's not what I am looking for."
    – Run5k
    Commented Sep 27, 2018 at 21:03
  • Good point @Run5k sorry about that. Maybe these steps will be of more help? top-password.com/blog/…
    – xpkiro
    Commented Sep 27, 2018 at 21:22
  • @JoshMcMullin once again that is some good advice, but if you scrutinize the article you will see that both methods are initiated from within a Windows 10 environment, a.k.a. "where Windows 10 is already installed" and the OP stressed that they don't want to do that. Additionally, that web page has a habit of copying source material from How-To Geek almost completely without giving them proper credit.
    – Run5k
    Commented Sep 28, 2018 at 16:35
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I think you would need to slipstream the driver into your boot media. If you have problems with it, you might also need to disable Secure Boot in the BIOS.

See the Microsoft article Add and Remove Drivers to an offline Windows Image, where is described using the DISM command to inject the driver with the /ForceUnsigned parameter so as to accept the unsigned driver and to override the requirement that drivers installed on X64-based computers must have a digital signature.

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  • When you use dism forceunsigned doesn't it mean that you don't need to disable signature enforcement? When I used dism as opposed to just dragging in the driver files, I didnt have to press F8 during windows setup. The keyboard and mouse cut out during the completing installation stage so I used the onscreen keyboard, but weirdly, at some point, the xhci driver started working without 'disable driver signature enforcement' enabled and now I can install any old unsigned driver without needing it. It is strange
    – Lewis Kelsey
    Commented Jun 26, 2022 at 2:08
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I found a backdoor method:

  • Create a bootable WinPE USB
  • Copy your drivers onto the WinPE drive
  • Boot into WinPE
  • Use drvload to load your drivers
  • Verify your device is accessible (mine was an AMD B450 SATA RAID) I actually used DISM to put the drivers into my PE boot.wim
  • If installing windows from USB swap out the drives, run DISKPART and RESCAN
  • Run Setup.exe from your install drive

For some odd reason Windows then partitioned my drive as MBR and then complained it needs to be GPT, so I to get a CMD prompt, ran DISKPART and CLEANed my target disk, then went back to Setup, Refresh, selected the disk again and this time it partitioned it correctly. Go figure.

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