The rest of the Server Core hardware story
I think I got a little carried away talking about the SC command line tool last week and how to use it to help manage drivers. So carried away in fact, that I forgot to explain how to install a new driver.
For hardware that has an in the box driver in Longhorn Server, you just need to install the hardware, startup the server, and log on to the box. Plug and Play will detect the hardware change, rescan, and automatically install the driver. There is no UI or need for administrator interaction. In the case of a new network adapter, running IPconfig will show the new adapter and its IP address (if you are using DHCP). You can also use SC.exe to see that it was installed, but I told myself no rambling about SC.exe this week, so you’ll have to look at last weeks post for the details on using it.
For hardware that does not have a driver included in Longhorn Server, such as a new piece of hardware that comes out after release, as long as you have a PnP driver for it, it can be installed from the command line. To do this, you need to either copy the driver files to a temporary folder on the Server Core box or make them available on a network share. In Server Core beta 2, you then run the Drvload.exe command to install them, pointing the tool at the driver inf file:
Drvload <path>\<driver>.inf
This will install the driver in the repository and kick off a PnP rescan, which will detect the hardware, find the new driver, and install it for you.
Hopefully this fills in the gap in the hardware story that I left last week.
Andrew
