\
Tips and Tricks
Tools
DEVCON.EXE
This is a Microsoft tool described in Knowledge base article
"311272
".
It is available on Windows 2000+.
You may also be interested in the
Device Driver Installation section of this manual (it lists other possible tools as well).
The DevCon utility is a command line utility that acts as an alternative
to Device Manager.
Using DevCon, you can enable, disable, restart, update, remove, and query
individual devices or groups of devices. DevCon provides information that
is relevant to the developer and is not available in Device Manager.
DevCon is not redistributable
(this reduces a nice and useful tool to something with perhaps "some" use).
I'm going to assume internal use in your company is not distribution.
It is provided for use as a debugging and development tool.
You can freely modify DevCon for private use.
The sample demonstrates how to use the SetupAPI and CfgMgr32 functions
together effectively to enumerate devices and perform device operations.
Note that the source is available so you could create your own program based
on this.
Note the use of the "^" character to "escape" the ampersand
characters in the hardware ID:
devcon install etzkp.inf USB\VID_108C^&PID_0200^&MI_01
devcon install etzkq.inf USB\VID_108C^&PID_0101
Example #2 - Correct Unknown Devices |
The following demonstrates the removal of "unknown" devices
("?" in device manager) and if any were found then a hardware scan
is performed:
echo off
setlocal
set RemoveFile=Remove.txt
del "%RemoveFile%" >nul 2>&1
@REM *** Remove unknown devices, if any found need a rescan ***
devcon.exe /remove =Unknown > "%RemoveFile%"
type "%RemoveFile%"
find.exe /I "No devices removed" "%RemoveFile%" >nul 2>&1
if errorlevel 1 devcon.exe /rescan