Windows ADK and/or ADK WinPE might break some USB sticks

pmikep

Active Member
Not an NTLite related topic, so I put it here in General, hoping that the search engines pick it up to help anyone else with this rare problem.

I have Windows 10. (I don't think the flavor matters.) I also have an SD card that has been formatted for CHDK, to use in my Canon Digital camera.

To access the DCIM directory on the SD card that has CHDK on it, I put the card in a USB-3 Card reader and plug that into a USB-3 port in my desktop computer.

This has worked fine for years.

Until the other day.

The other day, when I plugged the card reader in with the CHDK SD card, Windows bonged "In" - and then "Out."

I was not able to see the CHDK'd SD card anymore.

I tried a different - a normal (not CHDK'd) - SD card. That worked fine. So the problem was following the CHDK SD card.

I tried a different Card Reader with the CHDK card in it. No change. I tried plugging the Card Readers into a USB 2.0 port. No change.

I plugged one of the Card Readers with the CHDK SD card into a friend's Win10 Laptop and it worked there. While there I did a CHKDSK /f on the SD Card. No errors found.

So, the usual computer troubleshooting question: What changed since the last time this worked properly?

The last thing that I did to my desktop was to install Microsoft's Windows ADK and MS's ADK WinPE Setup tools.

(These were needed to make TBWinPE , a bootable SD card for Terabyte's Image for Windows running in the WinPE environment. (I need this sometimes because I have mirrored two hard drives in Win10 using Storage Spaces, and this is the only way that I can see this mirror when "outside" of Windows.))

When I restored a previous image of my Win10 OS partition (to before I had installed the ADK's), the problem went away.

So the problem is following the ADK's.

I don't know why this happened. Apparently there is some kind of interaction with my CHDK formatted SD Card and the Windows ADK. (Does the ADK install a special USB driver? Perhaps to "burn" a WinPE image to an SD Card? (I don't know.))

I expect that this same problem will occur if one installs MS's AIK too.
 
ADK/AIK installs the wofadk.sys filter driver to support Windows Overlay Filter (WOF) compression, used by WIM or CompactOS images.
I have no idea if it interferes with reading SD card volumes.

That's the only driver change made by ADK/AIK, and nothing except DISM & imagex cares about WOF support.

Removing the ADK/AIK should unload the driver on next reboot. Assuming ADK/AIK is the root cause, you should be able to repro the problem by installing/uninstalling it.
 
ADK/AIK installs the wofadk.sys filter driver to support Windows Overlay Filter (WOF) compression, used by WIM or CompactOS images.
I never would have known this. Thanks. It gives some credibility to my hypothesis.
 
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