Uninstall a Windows driver when the hardware is not connected

Question

I am developing a Windows C++ application that drives a motor controller that is plugged on USB. This controller relies on Ftdibus drivers and it works fine on my PC. However, on a test computer it used to work but since I messed up with the Ftdi drivers as soon as I plug the controller, I get a BSoD (mentioning Ftdibus). I would like to cleanup the drivers, but:

• they do not appear in Windows "uninstall programs"
• I can't right click on the controller in the device manager and chose "uninstall" because I can't plug the controller (BSoD)
• I tried nirsoft tool that has an option to uninstall devices but it won't work

I'm clueless, how could I clean up that mess?

PS: if anyone has documentation regarding how drivers are bound to an USB port number, I would enjoy reading on the subject

Solution 1

If this is Vista and later, the supported method for deleting a driver package is with pnputil:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff550428(v=vs.85).aspx#deleting_a_driver_package_from_the_driver_store

Just deleting the service is sort of a bad idea, that's not the only thing that installing a driver puts in the registry.

I missed the second part of your post about how Windows binds drivers to USB devices. There's a nice description of it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/10/255047.aspx

If you need more details feel free to contact me (I specialize in Windows drivers for a living :))

Solution 2

How I do it is one of three ways:

1. Go into Device Manager, select 'view' menu and select the 'Show hidden devices'. Find your device description and select the 'uninstall' menu option. [easy]

2. You can use the Service Control Manager command line 'SC' to delete the device driver from the registry. You will need to know the installed driver name. [medium]

3. Manually delete the driver setup in the registry. Using regedit, you can delete the registry entries for the driver. Drivers registry setup lives under 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services'. Find the driver name key and delete it. [hard]

Comments

[Julien M]

Already tried method #1: device does not show up. Will try #2 and #3. Thanks

[John Strood]

@snoone How do I uninstall and install back again a device driver?

[Michael]

argh! how am i supposed to know what this driver's name is?

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