Installing Serial Port Driver on Windows

Question

I've been trying to install a Plug and Play Device Driver for a USB Serial Port, specifically the FTDI Device Drivers. I'm trying to install the driver programatically without having to request input from the user. I've tried copying the INF file for the driver into

C:\WINDOWS\inf

and copying the SYS files for the driver into

C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers

but when I plug in the device the device manager still pops up looking for the sys files.

So far I haven't been able to find a tutorial on how to perform this kind of installation.

Based on the error message I'm getting from the device manager I assume it still can't find the SYS file, despite me placing them in the drivers directory.

Answer 1

You can't just drop the .inf file in the c:\\windows\\inf directory. It needs to be pre-compiled to a .pnf file and (probably) some kind of plug-and-play catalog needs to be updated. Which is done by calling SetupCopyOEMInf() .

Decent step-by-step instructions are available here .