I want to share a really bad experience I had recently with my PC, and i'm sure that many of you have seen this mentioned on other pages or even had it yourself. Is about the PACE license support, used by many softwares, being the most notorious Pro Tools and AIR Music Technology.
It's no secret that Microsoft has become extremely demanding about software compatibility with Windows 10, especially with drivers; In the world of technology, Microsoft's history is well known fighting with all kinds of licensing and copy protection systems, from constantly active game protection drivers taking resources (EA electronics as always), to buggy DLLs for features that no one needs or wants, and ending with the theme of this post: PACE or ILok license SUPPORT.
I will explain my situation: 2 days ago, I installed a plugin that needs ILok to be authorized, and right after installing everything worked well, without errors. One day passes and all good, Windows boots smoothly and the plugin works very well. This morning, I woke up and turned on the computer to start working on a song and it happened... Blue screen of death; The problem? this file "tpkd.sys", along with the code "PAGE ERROR ON NONPAGED AREA" (common in problems with the driver). Seeing this, I did the normal thing when a driver fails: Boot into safe mode and remove it, but even in that mode the blue screen still appears. I tried all the other ways because I had to start up to see what that damn file was. I had no choice but to google the file and what was it? The ILok system driver file...
Under this circumstance where it cannot be booted, the system cannot repair, and there is no way to run official fixers, the logical thing to do was to boot from the Windows installer and repair the computer, right? No, that's useless too. The worst part is that in almost every forum, including the Microsoft forum, people gave the same answers:
- Reinstall Windows
- Reinstall Windows
- Start from Safe Mode and uninstall the driver
- Reinstall Windows
- Run ILok installer to fix the driver
- Reinstall Windows
- Recover from an image
- Reinstall Windows
- Reinstall Windows
- Reinstall Windows
Therefore, seeing that many people ask for help on how to solve this same problem, without any positive response from the specialists, I decided to make a complete detailed guide on how I did it, leaving links to all resources. This will work for ALL driver or program issues that lock your system to boot or work properly.
IMPORTANT NOTE, PLEASE READ:
- If you do not have minimal knowledge about computers, do not attempt to do so yourself.
- You will be interacting with vital file systems, so you will need to focus on what you touch or delete because a bad action can make the damage to your system worse.
- Make sure that the problem you are having can be solved by deleting the driver, other than touching the Windows home folder.
- Before doing anything, do the research about your issue the best you can, look for locations, fails, filename, extension, everything; Don't leave anything that could slow you down.
With nothing more to say, let's start with the tutorial:
Important information
For this process you will need a laptop or a computer from where you can download and create all necessary resources. The default location of all drivers in windows is "C:\Windows\System32\drivers", and is the same location of the ILok driver. This folder is the same for 32 and 64 bits systems.
About Linux
NOTE: I know, many people is afraid of the difficulty and entanglement of Linux, and they have reasons; Because of that, in this post i'll be explaining ONLY the essential things.
To give a brief explanation, Linux is not a OS itself, is the core or what is called "Kernel" and acts like a universal engine that you can install on any car body. The distributions or "Distros", are systems built by companies and other persons using Linux as heart of the OS; This distros can are different of each other by many ways, added features, special functions, extra programs, but all of the distros share the same Linux core. Due to this there's a ton of distros available for every kind of needs and workload.
I've chosen the easiest and the best distro available: Linux Mint. The first step will be downloading the install image from the official website:
https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=281
In the page there's a list with a lot of mirror links available, choose the World mirror or the closer to your location for better download speed.
Creating a Linux bootable USB drive:
After having the image downloaded, you need to create the USB drive from where you will boot Linux mint. For this you will have to download Rufus, a small program that creates bootable USB drives with all kind of images and file systems. The download link is available on their official website:
https://rufus.ie/
Select the Portable edition and download it. After having the following file: rufus-3.12p.exe (the version can change with any future updates of Rufus), Execute it and will ask you if can it search updates online, press Yes and the main window with all the options will appear.
Click on SELECT, and locate your Linux mint iso.
After having the .iso loaded, click START and you will get a message asking you to allow the download of necessary libraries for the process; click Yes and immediately you will get another message asking you te select the mode of the image: select DD mode and then OK.
Accept the next message advising that the USB drive will be formatted and the process will start. After the process finished, extract the USB drive and insert it on the computer to be repaired.
Deleting driver manually
This process was made on a Virtual Machine created for testing; This processes are the same on all computers, the only things that can change are the keystrokes to select the boot device on startup, it depends of the manufacturer of the board and the model.
To boot to the linux USB, insert the thumb drive on the computer, start it and inmediatelly press the keystroke to enter the boot device selection:
- Esc for HP
- F12 for Acer
- F8 or Esc for Asus
- F12 for Dell
- F12 or F10 for Lenovo
- F11 for Msi
- F10 for Asrock
With the system booted and loaded, go the the top-left corner and double-click on the "Computer" icon to open the main disk, from where you'll select your Windows drive; In my case is "VBOX HARDDISK", on your computer can be named "Local disk":
Your directory should look like this:
After getting into the Windows drive, go to "Windows -> System32 -> drivers", and locating the file you want to delete (In case you want to delete other driver, for this guide is "tpkd.sys") by typing the name with your keyboard, the search box will appear automatically on the bottom-right corner of the directory window
With the driver located and selected, left-click the file and delete it:
Now the only thing left is restarting, removing the USB drive and waiting for Windows to load:
FINAL RESULTS
Now Windows is booting and without errors or blue screens!!
I hope this was useful to you on fixing your problem. If you have and doubt or question about this or any other problem, please contact me via private message.
