As always I get the weird requests at work, and some of them I don't have answers to.

I need to install some drivers prior to the device been connected to the system, so that when the device is connected to the system Windows 2000 recognises it.
No I can't just connect it, install the drivers and then remove the device, some people in Legal are paranoid about licensing and such.
Also, how do I later remove these drivers?
Is this at all possible?
Thanks all.

It would depend on the drivers for this device. If you have the inf and a few other files you should be able to just right click on the inf and pick install. If the drive is an EXE like most sound card drivers you can try just running it and see if it will install. Some drivers will install some won't. If this is a program that won't install without the device then you can try getting the file from the temp storage once the install was started. I have installed drivers this way before.

To uninstall the drivers use regmon to log registry changes and filemon to see what files it creates during the install and store this info so you can manually remove them later. Both can be downloaded from http://www.sysinternals.com/

Something like what Tom said. There are a few departments with in work that I steer clear of and Legal is one of them, most other departments I'll push the issue or at least get a decent excuse.

Mean time I need to be creative and figure a way around this.
Chad, thanks for the suggestions, I've tried them and failed, though it was a third party who did the testing as I didn't have hardware access at the time - I do now.

The suitation I'm in is strange, I need to make the adding and removing of the hardware as simple as possible, hence I want to remove the driver install section, however the computer to which the hardware was connected to will eventually ship to a customer which is where Legal step in. Time to start banging my head against the wall.

On a side issue my VMware ESX install is coming along nicely, If anyone want to pop in and have a look see in a few months just PM me.

Check out WinDriversBackup and DriverView

They both will only be helpful once they are installed. But the driver backup might be able to make a set of files that could be installed without the device connected.

I'm confused by the question.

You didn't state the type of device. But in most cases, the instructions that come with Windows-centric USB peripherals specifically say, "Please install the device drivers before plugging this in."

So you're asking if it's OK to do exaclty what the instructions tell you to do? That's why I'm confused.

Can you provide more details about the device in question?

Tony, the drivers in question are for a Quatech USB to 8 serial ports adaptor. The drivers are a few DLL, SYS & INF files, but pre-install the INFs (right click->install) does nothing. I'd really not like todo a setup capture

Chad, I'll give them a go, they do sound interesting.

Chad,
WinDriversBackup did the trick.
I found out from it that INFs were getting renamed when placed in the INF directory to a OEM?.inf naming convention.
I also had to alter the \Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup: "SourcePath"="%PATH%" to where I was placing the drivers.
With this don't all the end users have todo is press enter twice - almost idiot proof.

Removing it will be another trick, but that is a dance for another day.
If you ever get up north I'll buy some beers.

Tony, any intrest in moving to Boston?

Ah, gotcha. Glad you got it worked out. I could turn that into a nice slick little installer for you where the INF file didn't get deleted.

Quote:
Tony, any intrest in moving to Boston?

Not yet. I could get desperate, though, if local work doesn't pan out. How's the skiing up there?