Bluetooth update killed my Windows 7

[cebula]

This happened to me too...  I have a Lenovo T61 with Windows 7 64-bit.  Luckily, I caught it before it crashed my system.  It's cost me hours of having to recover files though...

I had Symantec Endpoint Protection installed...and guess what?  It deleted critical files Symantec needs to run too...great.  Works fine after recovery, but seriously, this problem been going on for this long and nothing is being done about it?  A driver software installation that wipes a hard drive is something I've never heard of before until now...

[cebula]

al3nas ...did you have any luck calling Lenovo support in regards to this?  I'm finding this rather pathetic that you reported this over a month ago, and Lenovo has yet to address the issue.

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

Cebula,

We are looking into it.... 

While the reported consequences are rather severe, given the volume of downloads, if this were a 100% issue, the forum would be flooded with people instead of just a couple that have reported this over the span of several months.   

I'll share updates as we know more...

Mark

[cebula]

I understand that.  Thanks for looking into it.

[xy1331]

I'd like to second the lameness of Lenovo not doing anything-- or even really caring about this-- for 2 months now.  The fact that this driver installation even passed testing and was released is ridiculous.  And then to not even do anything about it for 2 months after it's been proven to cause the *worst possible thing that happen to your computer*.  Not even a warning or announcement anywhere.

I ran this driver update on my Windows 7 Pro x64 T410 and within a couple minutes *everything* on my hard drive was gone.  I can only hope that someone with more motivation and legal resources tries to do the same.

Absolutely pathetic.

FYI, I had a fully up-to-date copy of Sophos Antivirus running and it didn't do or detect anything while this driver update was destroying my laptop.  That would seem to indicate there's no virus in this installation, it's the installation package itself that wipes out your system.

[xy1331]

Actually it wasn't Windows 7 Pro x64, it was regular 32-bit Windows 7 Pro.

I'm now running x64 and am terrified of trying to get Bluetooth working on it.

[FLCamaro95]

All,

Same here, was installing Bluetooth Enhanced Rate Update Windows 7 64-Bit and at 91% I could see desktop items diasppearing. Needless to say restore, recover, last known etc are useless! Please post some resolution as I now haw to go recover my lost data and hope the hard drive images work.

[cebula · Accepted solution]

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al3nas wrote:

I think I might have had 7zbv14ww.exe before I installed 7zbv15ww.exe too.

So this could relate to bad uninstall procedure with the new or older driver.

After installing this new driver (without setup, through device manager and pointing to driver folder) my version of ThinkPad Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate is 6.2.0.1417. And it is working fine. And when installing this way - I do not have all annoying plugins like send to bluetooth or office plugins for bluetooth.

Don't know details about friends computer, just know that it was wiped out after bluetooth update.

So lesson here is to:

1. Uninstall old driver first (if it is in programs and features)

2. Do not run setup.exe

3. Update driver through device manager

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I believe I tried this myself but didn't have much success.  It "seemed" like it installed, but I couldn't get my bluetooth devices to connect...  Either way, it's a temporary solution even if it does work.

FLCamaro95...as for recovering from the issue...you'll most likely need to reformat and reinstall Windows.  BUT, before you do that, follow the instructions that outouser posted in another thread on this issue...should work:

http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/X-Series-Tablet-ThinkPad-Laptops/Bluetooth-with-Enhanced-Data-Rate-Softw...

[jpalumbo]

Same thing happened to me...

I was installing the blue tooth update and my system just sat there grinding the hard drive...

Finally I could not do anything and power cycled the unit.

Then I could not boot up Win7 Enterprise 32bit... (The error suggested the registry was corrupt)

Used the win7 repair disk to look and found all my files gone...

This is very unacceptable!

Note: I was running ESET NOD32 Antivirus the newest version up to date definitions.

[al3nas]

cebula: You are right - that solution is temporary - some devices work, but others don't...