Fingerprint reader suddenly stopped working

Community Support
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OS: Windows 11 Pro 23H2 22631.4751
System: Laptop 16 (Ryzen 9 7940HS with Radeon 7700S)

Howdy, my fingerprint scanner has suddenly stopped working a couple of days ago. I don’t think anything changed, but now whenever I try to scan my finger, it just gives the error message “Something went wrong. Please try again.”

I’ve rebooted and shut down a few times. I’ve checked the Device Manager, and it says it’s working properly. No recent driver changes, nothing to rollback to.

Any suggestions on what I could check for? Is it possible that the hardware is broken?

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Chances are, the encrypted storage on the scanner itself has become corrupted or disjointed from Windows…or a Windows update borked the Group Policy. When you register fingerprints in the OS, the cryptographic signatures are stored in the fingerprint device, itself. If anything happens to that “link,” the OS will no longer accept the keys, believing they’ve been compromised.

This is also why you can’t use the fingerprint scanner on more than one OS simultaneously in cases like dual-booting. One OS will always try to overwrite the other’s signatures when you try to register the fingerprints (or the scanner will refuse the overwrite with some devices/OSes)

Try removing the fingerprint setup in Windows and re-enroll to see if that gets you going again.

Also check out this thread where other Windows users have discussed their fingerprint woes:

Failing all of that, please submit a ticket to Framework Support via the proper channels. While their staff do participate in the forums, they can’t possibly read every single thread posted and may miss this one.

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Thanks, that thread did help a bit, even though it wasn’t the exact same issue I was having. However, it did lead me to check the Event Viewer (Application and Service Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Biometrics), where I did see a lot of verbose logs, and the error code 0x80284001.

I ended up disabling and re-enabling the fingerprint reader in the Device Manager, and that fixed it. Go figure, that it was as simple as that. I thought I had done that before, but I guess not.

Still, this has been very helpful.

1 Like
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Windows has always suffered most from a “turn it off and back on again” philosophy of software design. haha

Glad I could help!

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