Last Friday I upgraded from the Windows 8 Release Preview to the final version. I had been using the preview for a good while, so there weren’t many unexpected problems, but one of the ones I did have was pretty significant.
The install went smoothly, but after letting it sit for an hour or so, a reboot resulted in an Inaccessible_boot_device blue screen. The problem was resolved by a system restore, but again after letting it sit for a while restarting would result in a blue screen.
After fighting with it for a better part of a day, I finally realized that Windows was installing drivers in the background with no user notification other than a somewhat vague event log entry. My particular problem was caused by Intel Smart Response Drivers being installed while I had disabled that feature in the BIOS.
I haven’t figured out how to disable this “feature” completely, but the workaround was to wait for it to install, then roll back the driver in Device Manager. I also had to hide the related update in Windows Update.
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