Unable To Start The Change Tracking Driver | Vmware Vcenter Converter Standalone

That made sense. The server was old—Windows 2008 R2 with an older Secure Boot policy and no SHA-2 code signing updates. VMware’s newer drivers used SHA-2 certificates. The OS didn't trust them.

She tried the easy fix first: reboot the source server. The app team had said "no reboots until Q4," but Sarah had learned that "critical" sometimes meant "we forgot the admin password." She rebooted anyway.

The next conversion attempt was clean. The driver started. The clone synced block by block.

She uninstalled Converter completely from the source machine (cleanup with Converter standalone clean-up utility ), deleted leftover VMware folders from ProgramData and AppData\Local , then reinstalled. Still broken. That made sense

She had done this a hundred times.

ERROR: Failed to install change tracking driver. Error 577: Windows cannot verify the digital signature for this driver. A recent hardware or software change might have installed a file that is signed incorrectly or damaged. Error 577. Signature validation failure.

Sarah sighed. Not this again. She opened her browser and started the late-night ritual. The VMware forums were full of similar stories—admins stranded at the same 5% wall. Change tracking. That kernel-level driver used by Converter, Backup APIs, and replication tools to monitor disk block modifications. Without it, no incremental sync, no hot cloning. Just failure. The OS didn't trust them

A red error bubble popped up: "Unable to start the change tracking driver."

She checked if the driver was even present. On the source machine, she opened C:\Windows\System32\drivers and looked for vmware-ctk.sys . Nothing. That meant Converter never installed it properly—or the OS blocked it.

And somewhere in a data center, another Windows box silently stopped breathing, waiting for its own 2 AM hero. The next conversion attempt was clean

Bingo. The server had Hyper-V role installed (even though no VMs were running) and Device Guard enabled via group policy. Hyper-V and VMware’s change tracking driver cannot coexist—they fight for the same virtualization primitives.

This time, the driver installed. The progress bar jumped from 5% to 15%.

She changed it to "Warn" (temporarily), ran gpupdate /force , rebooted again, and started the conversion.