Core Isolation turned off due to WDCSAM64_PREWIN8.SYS incompatibility

Question

I have been running Windows 11 successfully on my Microsoft Surface for some time now with no problems.

Within the last day or so, I all of a sudden got a notification that Core Isolation has been disabled due to an incompatible driver, WDCSAM64_PREWIN8.SYS.

From what I can see, this driver is related to Western Digital. However, I do not have any Western Digital devices attached to my Surface, nor have I recently added/installed anything from Western Digital.

I have tried searching for this driver but have come up empty.

Answer 1

1. Select the Startbutton and type “Core isolation”.
2. Select the Core Isolation system settings from the search results to open the Windows security app.

On the Core isolation page, you’ll find Memory integrity along with the toggle to turn it on

• If you receive a notification / message says that the memory integrity can't be turn on follow the below steps.

1. Try to scan and fix.
2. If it is not solved, please click on "Review any driver incompatibilities".

3.We can see a driver or more.

4. Please note the published name here is "oem46.inf"
5. Select the Start button and type “Device Manager" and follow as shown below.

6. Select the right driver from Device manager"oem46.inf" and right click and select remove driver.

Example :-

7. System needs to be restarted after removal of the driver.

Hopefully this will solve your issues no need to install any software for this.

Answer 2

The simplest, and likely most surefire way to fix this, as I found out, is to have Microsoft tech support do the work. Yeah, you spend some time in the hold queue, but the tech that helped me got it fixed in about 15 minutes.

Answer 3

Huge thanks everyone for these posts but it did not work for me. Got a message in the cmd.exe shell: "Failed to delete driver package: One or more devices are presently installed using the specified INF."

So I figured the miscreant driver (Lenovo Yoga-6, oem27.inf v1.2.0.0 v11/29/2017) was in use so I went no further. Didn't want to break anything. Hoping that resolution comees around, perhaps in tomorrow's patch Tuesday?

I tried to look to see what brand of drives were installed but Sys Info just says SSD NTFS - no brand given.

Note: I determined the offending driver was oem27.inf from the dropdown as well as result of the pnputil search so I know that's right.

Answer 4

this solved it perfectly

thank you

Answer 5

I have the same exact issue but on a Dell G3. Same drive name.