Windows 10 Adventure Part 1 :: M16-DX Driver Work Around

I’m not sure if I will have enough time to document all of my adventure with upgrading to Windows 10. Needless to say, it wasn’t as painless as I would have hoped.

There is one thing I want to document in the hopes that it might help someone else who has an Roland/Edirol M16-DX sound board. At the time of writing this, Roland hasn’t released a Windows 10 driver, and at the moment it’s unclear if they will. That said, the 8.1 driver works just fine, but does require 2 “hacks” to achieve it.

The first hack is to the INF file:

1. Change the %MfgName% to be %MfgName%=Roland,NTamd64.6.2
2. Remove the section with the header [Roland.NTamd64.7]

Doing this will allow Windows 10 to see the driver, however, it will no longer install it as the INF file and the HASH associated with the cat file no longer match (security issue). To get around this problem, you have to perform a second hack that disables the driver security check. To do that, you have to boot into a special mode. Click here to read how to do that.

Once the Driver Signature Verification is turned off, it should install the board without issue (and it appears to work just fine… I haven’t tested the ASIO yet, but all my inputs and outputs are showing up in Windows 10, and sound is flowing.

I’ll make this last note in case I don’t get back to my adventures in upgrading to windows 10:

I strongly encourage a clean install… Which if your going to do.. YOU NEED to get the key first (assuming your doing the free upgrade). Doing an in-place install left me in a non-bootable state where I had to do a clean install (most likely due to my wide array of weird drivers). That said, clean installs means fast OS’s… I don’t think my computer has been this fast since 2010…

And for those of you who are wondering: other than the launch day hiccups… Windows 10 seems great to me so far. No complaints (other than the install/driver issues which were to be expected day 1).