PnPUtil - Show Hidden devices in cmd call

Question

Hi,

Recently I've been experiencing an issue wherein my PC doesn't detect my graphics card. Using the windows device manager to "scan for hardware changes" will sometimes resolve this, but sometimes this fix won't work unless I toggle on "View -> Show Hidden Devices". In these cases, I might "scan for hardware changes" multiple times with no success, and then repeat that with "Show Hidden Devices" activated and solve the issue right away.

I was wondering if this functionality can be mimicked in a call from CMD. I'd like to not have to open device manager every time I start my PC, so I wrote a .bat script (that runs as administrator) to automate this process by just calling pnputil.exe /scan-devices.

Is there a flag or option to include hidden devices in this scan? I can't find anything like this in the PnPUtil command syntax. Or what else might be causing the discrepancy between calling PnPUtil from the command line versus from the UI application?

Answer 1

Hi Nick,

You should be able to trigger the same effect by restarting the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service, this should also trigger a pnp re-detect

The command to do this:

net stop winmgmt && net start winmgmt

hope this helps,