Adding .inf drivers using PowerShell, possible?

Question

Are we able to install drivers via their .inf files etc. using a PowerShell cmdlet? When Googling I found, Add-WindowsDriver but I think this one is for an offline Windows image. Does that mean an image that is not currently used on an OS? If not, please teach me how to write the parameters. Thank you!

Diffuse

Start-Process -Path $PathToInf -Verb Install? – Shipmaster

I just realize you can right click install .inf files, however, this .inf file says "The INF file you selected does not support this method of installation." – Diffuse

How about using PNPUTIL? For example: pnputil.exe -i -a C:\example\example.INF – Princedom

Hi Benh, it gave me an error Failed to install: No more data is available I believe this is because the device already has an existing driver, I need to install these new drivers I have, how would I tell PS or CMD specifically to replace the existing drivers with this new one? – Diffuse

You'll need to delete the old one first. So you'll need to enumerate all of the current drivers with pnputil.exe -e then find what it's named and then pnputil.exe -f -d oem0.inf (-f is force and may not be needed) – Princedom

Answer 1

This PowerShell script will do what you want:

Get-ChildItem "C:\Driver File Location" -Recurse -Filter "*inf" | ForEach-Object { PNPUtil.exe /add-driver $_.FullName /install } 

Clavate

Answer 2

You don't need Powershell or advanced CMD programming, because pnputil.exe has a /subdirs command line switch and can slurp multiple .inf files at once. On my system (Windows 10 x64 21H2), you can simply execute:

pnputil /add-driver *.inf /install /subdirs

That does what I would expect.

pnputil.exe's help tells everything we need. Just execute pnputil without further parameters, and it outputs an understandable help screen (that is too long to post it here).

Cricket

Answer 3

Reposting the comment (credit to @Bacon Bits), because it works.

Start-Process -$PathToInf -Verb Install

worked for me

Covering

Answer 4

This one liner has always served me good for injecting drivers.

for /f "delims=" %%J in ('dir /b /s "c:\out-of-box-drivers\\*.inf"') do pnputil.exe -i -a "%%J%

Monk

Answer 5

It can be done using the Install-DeviceDriver cmdlet from the DeviceManagement module. See my answer here for an example.

Clinician

This tool is no longer working properly. – Isogloss