Using DPInst

Someday you may need to install a driver on a windows system. If you are in an enterprise environment, you may have a few requirements. First, you don't want the end-user prompted to install drivers. They may actually do it and end up installing something you don't want them to install. That brings us to a second need, a silent install. We don't want the user to be interupted. Lastly, it is important to have some flexibility on what were installing. For instance, maybe we only want to install the driver if the device is installed. OR maybe we want to pre-install a driver for later use. Whatever our case may be, DPInst is a good solution in most cases.

First things first, you can download DPInst as part of the Driver Installation Framework from Microsoft's WHDC site. You may instead want to install the full Windows Driver Kit (WDK) which will include future updates to DPInst.

You can refer to the command-line switches for more info, but here are some of the more useful switches.

/path

This switch changes the DPInst working directory. Normally DPInst will only search the directory it is ran from.

/s

Switches to silent mode. This will quietly install drivers.

/LM

Uses Legacy mode to install drivers. That allows you to install drivers that aren't signed.

/sh

Scans your hardware and installs only if the device is present and the new driver is better than what is already installed.

/se /sa /sw

These are for suppressing EULA, Add/Remove Programs Entry, and the Wizard in that order. The silent switch should take care of the first and last switch. The Add/Remove Programs Entry you may want to remove.