Windows Vista x64 Ultimate on an Asus X553MA

[RatcheT2498]

(Posted something very similar to this topic on the Ivy Bridge Vista drivers topic a bit ago - applogies if this counts as spam, thought it was more proper to make a separate topic for it)

I'm having problems installing Windows Vista on an Asus X553MA laptop. It's a laptop that doesn't suppprt Vista, being a Windows 10 laptop when I got it, so I'm not really surprised about having issues.

The OS is actually working alright by itself, no real crashes so far. I've had success with Snappy Driver Installer, which installed e. g. the synaptics touchpad, bus and chipset drivers, etc, but I'm having problems with the graphics, bluetooth and wifi drivers. SDI does find the BT and wifi drivers, but it always fails to install them. Not sure why. I'm mainly focusing on the graphics drivers for now, though.

It's got an Intel Pentium N3540 BayTrail CPU with integrated graphics only. As far as I'm able to tell, it's effectively an Intel Atom z37xx core with Ivy Bridge GT2 graphics attached to it. (some sources I've found said the core is a Silvermont architecture, though. Still a bit confused about all the different architectures lol). I've been sadly unable to find any drivers that could support Vista - the earliest ones I've found support Windows 7 as a minimum, and I've looked through a lot of sources. (On a side note, good lord, finding Intel legacy drivers is difficult. What the hell Intel, how does softpedia have a better archive than you)

For program compatibility I've installed around 200+ updates and win32's KernelEx. To get the driver to even install I transplanted the setup program from the drivers in the Ivy Bridge Vista forum post and modified the installer inf file. I've checked the driver sys file and all the dll files I could find with Dependency Walker and fixed what incompatibilities I could find using the ntoskrn8.sys extender method. I then followed the modified NVidia graphics driver steps, that is rebuilding the checksum with CFF Explorer, installing the driver with testsigning on, and then signing it with the driver signing program before rebooting. No matter what I do however, I get error 0x39. No BSOD or bugcheck or anything, just a plain "driver corrupted or failed to load".

I've started comparing the kernel drivers with Ghidra and I've noticed the Vista Ivy Bridge DRIVER_INITIALIZATION_DATA has a GDI version of 0x2007 while the Win7 drivers have a version of 0x40xx  (I don't rrememberexactly, will update later) - could this be the main culprit? I have tried replacing the value with the Vista one using a hex editor, but nothing changed (I didn't nop out the redundant function definitions though - hoped it would just ignore them). Other than that there didn't seem to be any hardcoded version checks or anything of the sort from what I've been able to RE.

The installer also complains at the end of the install that the drivers are unsigned, but it still seems to install, unless it corrupts some registry entries or something.

I am thinking that I'm going to have to uninstall Vista and install Windows 7 alongside the graphics driver to check which files it even uses, since the driver installer includes a metric ton of them for different processors and configurations, but I'm keeping that as a plan D because I really don't want to repeat the update installation process again lol. Might be nice to have a lean installer for testing purposes, though...

Would anyone be able to advise me what to do, or what could be going wrong? I have no way of debugging anything, since local kernel debugging doesn't seem to be a thing, the laptop has no external serial or firewire ports, I have no USB2.0 debugging dongle and the ported XHCI drivers I tried didn't work (not to mention I don't even know if any of my other computers have debug-enabled USB ports).

The iGPU device ID is 0xF31. Wasn't sure where to put this info so just tacked it on here hah).

Many thanks