Hey, don’t believe that this is a correct way of adding driver, but sometime you just need to be a bit a of “MacGyver” (If anyone can remember that TV Series, I’m Old so, hey I remember that anyway. For those that does not remember that it is all about being in trouble and fixing something extremely complicated to get out of trouble using simple things that you have around you and that is exactly what this is)

So, one more I’m working with a customer (still love that) and we are fooling around with drivers for different reasons, anyhow we need to load a bunch of drivers in the running OS and unfortunately you cannot use DISM.exe when the system is online for the purpose of loading drivers or remove them either for that matter, but you can use PNPUtil and that has one easy syntax, now, PNPUtil has one “small” issue, it cannot traverse folder. (Why is it never simple?)

Remembering “The good old days”

Luckily for me I’m a grove up using 8” floppy’s, so I know a bit DOS so I have done the “FOR %variable IN (set) DO command [command-parameters]” stuff a bunch of times (Credit to Björn Österman that explained this stuff many years ago). But then Microsoft started creating all the Resource kits for NT and one of the utilities in there was one of my loved ones, let me introduce Mr. ForeFiles.exe, one of of great hero’s back in the days.

Say Hi to ForFiles.exe

Forefiles.exe can basically do this “For every file that matches this criteria do the following” this is a perfect tool for automation when you need to remove, archive, delete files, like this:

forfiles.exe /P D:\ /M *.log /C “CMD /c del @Path”

That command will delete all the *.log files from the entire D:\ and all subfolders and by adding /D you can use date as a variable in many different ways, but this time we are not going to delete a bunch of files, instead we are going to add a bunch of drivers using pnputil.exe and forefiles.exe

Meet PNPUtil.exe

PNPUtil has a simple syntax and it is used to add drivers when then OS is running and here is the syntax:

Microsoft PnP Utility
Usage:
——
pnputil.exe [-f | -i] [ -? | -a | -d | -e ] <INF name>
Examples:
pnputil.exe -a a:\usbcam\USBCAM.INF      -> Add package specified by USBCAM.INF
pnputil.exe -a c:\drivers\*.inf          -> Add all packages in c:\drivers\
pnputil.exe -i -a a:\usbcam\USBCAM.INF   -> Add and install driver package
pnputil.exe -e                           -> Enumerate all 3rd party packages
pnputil.exe -d oem0.inf                  -> Delete package oem0.inf
pnputil.exe -f -d oem0.inf               -> Force delete package oem0.inf
pnputil.exe -?                           -> This usage screen

There are two things to note here

1. The dev guy did believe that there are still floppy drives around (I’ll guess hi is as old as I am…)
2. It does not have the traverse folder function that is needed since I don’t ever have all drivers in ONE folder

Time to for some action

By combining forfiles and pnputil we can create this neat little batch file

forfiles /p %1 /s /m *.inf /c “cmd /c pnputil -a @Path”

Save it as impdrv.cmd and run it using the following command

impdrv.cmd C:\Drivers

And it will search through the entire folder structure from C:\Drivers and add all drivers it can find on a running OS. And yes, you could use this in a task sequence to add drivers after the OS has been loaded if you need this for any reason…

/mike