How to add a driver to the DriverStore
Written by Milad Aslaner, Premier Field Engineer. From Germany.
How do I actually add a driver to the DriverStore?
Hey everyone, this is Milad from Germany.
Today I wanted to quickly write about how you can add additional drivers to the DriverStore.
All drivers are stored in the so called DriverStore, which is located under %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Windows\System32\DriverStore.
You can use the built-in command line tool pnputil to add or remove drivers.
How does it work?
- Start an elevated command prompt (Start, type CMD, hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter)
- Adding a driver:
- Pnputil.exe -a c:\LOCATION_OF_DRIVER\DRIVER_NAME.inf
The location can be either local or remote - Pnputil.exe -a C:\LOCATION_OF_DRIVER\*.inf
Copy all drivers from that folder
- Pnputil.exe -a c:\LOCATION_OF_DRIVER\DRIVER_NAME.inf
- Deleting a driver:
- Pnputil.exe -d DRIVER_NAME_inf
You can find more information about pnputil at: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff550428(v=vs.85).aspx.
Interested how it works under the hood? Or are you looking for assistance with your corporate master image? Contact your TAM and ask for a PFE!
Posted by Tristan Kington , MSPFE Editor, who notes that while not all PFEs are from Germany, it’s a really cool accent to have, ja?
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Great, but what about PowerShell (DISMcmdlet) support?Anonymous
September 03, 2016
with this trick you can get USB3 working when migrating an old win7 to new UEFI/skylake based setupAnonymous
October 12, 2017
Hi... I need to add a driver to the folder but I am not administrator. Using CMD I get access denied, so maybe Is ther some other way?