Forcing Windows to re-scan for drivers

Question

As part of our software's installation, we install drivers for a required 3rd party hardware component. Currently it's up to the user to manually scan for their hardware's drivers once our installation is completed.

Is there an easy way to get Windows to automatically look for the drivers we installed? If so, how does it work? Do we need to tell the OS for which hardware device we have drivers, or just that we have drivers in a certain location? Or can we just install the drivers to System32 folder and trigger a driver rescan?

Answer 1

So the hardware is already plugged in when you install the driver?

Download the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) and see the devcon sample (binary and source included). The "devcon update" command should do what you want (i.e. install the drivers and then load them over the specified device instance).

-scott