Friday 22 January 2010

Drivers Causing "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer" On Startup

This weekend I had to reinstall a driver for a laptop touch pad. I went to the Sony site and got the driver, it came in a zip file and looked pretty standard. A load of driver files and an install file.


It install all OK and the touchpad started to have its scroll options, however then I rebooted and found each time the laptop started up Windows Vista kept asking to confirm I wanted to run the programs, "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer". Straight away I thought it had to be the file was blocked from running as it came from a download. I went to the files unblocked them all, clicked apply and rebooted again only to find it happen again.


Just to ensure I hadn't forgotten to click apply I tried this again only to find the same thing. After Googling for the issue I found the issue was that the installer had simply copied the drivers and files. This meant that the NTFS information was also copied, this information contained the flag "downloaded from internet" along with others.


The solution was to strip these files of this information, luckily you can obtain a free tool to do this. "Streams" from Sysinternals, I simply downloaded this,http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Streams.mspx, ran it on the directory, command prompt only, and rebooted to find all was well.

Certainly one to remember as I have came across this before and removed the program.