Are there Powershell cmdlets that install and remove Windows drivers?

Question

Note: For this question, when I refer to "Windows drivers" I mean .inf and associated files which can otherwise be installed by right-clicking the .inf and clicking "Install" in Windows Explorer. I do not mean any kind of setup.exe-style executable which might install a driver.

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There exists the following:

• Get-WindowsDriver -online - a Powershell Cmdlet that outputs the currently-installed drivers of the running system
• Add-WindowsDriver - a Powershell Cmdlet that adds a driver to an offline image. The corresponding Remove-WindowsDriver can be used to remove a driver from an offline image.
• dpinst.exe - a command line tool that can be used to install a driver to the running system. dpinst.exe /u can be used with the to uninstall drivers.

I have not, however, found a corresponding Powershell Cmdlet that supports installing and uninstalling drivers on the running system. I'm sure I could wrap dpinst.exe in some powershell, but I'd like to avoid mapping command line parameters and parsing output if a more Powershell-native method exists.

Do Powershell Cmdlets exist that install and uninstall Windows drivers on the running system? Is there some other way to install and uninstall Windows drivers using Powershell that does not involve dpinst.exe?

Solution 1

Not only are there not PowerShell cmdlets for this, it seems there isn't even managed code to do it within the .Net framework (what follows is basically a translation of that answer into PowerShell).

Luckily, the .Net framework can call windows APIs through platform invoke (p/invoke), and PowerShell can do so too.

The linked answer shows how to do it in C#. To do it powershell we'll use the same signature that was generated in that answer, and use it with the Add-Type cmdlet (see example 5) to make it available to your script.

$signature = @"
[DllImport("Setupapi.dll", EntryPoint="InstallHinfSection", CallingConvention=CallingConvention.StdCall)]
public static extern void InstallHinfSection(
    [In] IntPtr hwnd,
    [In] IntPtr ModuleHandle,
    [In, MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.LPWStr)] string CmdLineBuffer,
    int nCmdShow);
"@
$Win32Functions = Add-Type -MemberDefinition $signature -UsingNamespace System.Runtime.InteropServices -Name Win32SInstallHinfSection -Namespace Win32Functions -PassThru 

$Win32Functions::InstallHinfSection([IntPtr]::Zero, [IntPtr]::Zero, "<section> <mode> <path>", 0)

See the MSDN documentation for InstallHinfSection for details on the parameters (particularly the string format).

Solution 2

There is a PowerShell module named DeviceManagement, installable from the PowerShell Gallery via Install-Module, which contains the Install-DeviceDriver cmdlet. Example:

Install-Module -Name DeviceManagement -Force
Install-DeviceDriver -InfFilePath C:\Drivers\LAN\acmelan.inf
Get-Device | Where-Object Name -like 'ACME Network Adapter*' | Select-Object Name,DriverProvider,DriverVersion,DriverDescription,HasProblem

Solution 3

I have to add you can call the pnputil.exe command:

pnputil /add-driver "path\to\driver\*inf" /install

Comments

[alx9r]

InstallHinfSection seems to have a void return value and no return parameters. Should I expect exceptions from InstallHinfSection that can be caught in powershell?

[briantist]

@alx9r that's a very good question, which I don't have the answer to unfortunately. I recommend trying to force an exception to be thrown, maybe by feeding it invalid data, and see what it does.

[Harry Johnston]

No Windows API calls generate C++ exceptions, because they may be called from other languages such as C. (At a guess, InstallHinfSection will present a dialog box to the user if an error occurs.)