Unable to Enable Core Isolation Memory Integrity due to Western Digital Driver (Windows 10 2004)

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finally figured it out. The key here is the tool PnPUtil. I used this post as a launching point.

I did not see a single other way to remove this out of date, useless, broken Western Digital Driver. Not sure if this solution will work for everyone; it worked for me and I’ve included my thought process.

Goal: Delete out of date/broken drivers which stop memory isolation from running.
Problem: Drivers aren’t being used, are not associated with any useable software, and can’t be traditionally uninstalled.

Process:

  1. Open up command prompt (CMD) as an administrator

  2. type in “pnputil /?” without the quotation marks and hit enter.
    2a. This will show you all the parameters and what they do. Helps a novice figure things out.

  3. type in “pnputil /enum-drivers” without the quotation marks and hit enter.
    3a. This shows all the third party drivers installed. Find the drivers and that correspond to the incompatible drivers from memory isolation. You can get more details by clicking on the incompatible driver in memory isolation.
    3b. Confirm the drivers match and jot down the details of the drivers

  4. type in “pnputil /enum-devices /connected” without the quotation marks and hit enter.
    4a. To make sure the incompatible drivers aren’t being used, go through all the devices and check if the incompatible driver is listed by “Driver Name.” This part was annoying but made me less worried about breaking something.

  5. After confirming you’re in the clear, type in “pnputil /delete-driver oem#.inf /uninstall /force /reboot” without the quotation marks and hit enter.
    5a. Substitute oem#.inf with whatever your driver is causing problems.
    5b. Do this for each driver, one at a time, changing oem#.inf to match as you go along
    5c. /uninstall makes sure the driver is uninstalled; /force makes sure the driver is deleted, not a problem for us since we made sure it wasn’t being used; /reboot will restart the computer if deleting the driver requires it.

That’s it! super easy, super simple, super straight forward. Glad PnPUtil exists. Afterwards, I restarted my computer to be safe then turned on memory isolation, no problem.

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