REGSVR

The REGDRV application was developed to be a small and simple utility to install or remove device drivers. There exist several such utilities, and Microsoft recommends that device drivers be installed with ".INF" files.

With the goal of remaining a simple-to-use utility, REGDRV takes the shortcut that the "service name" and the "display name" of the driver are the same as the filename of the driver, without the extension ".SYS".

REGDRV has an interactive mode and a command line mode. If you start REGDRV without parameters, you will run interactive mode.

In the interactive mode, you can type the full path of the driver and then install it, start it, stop it or remove it. When installing the driver in interactive mode, you can choose whether the OS must start the driver automatically on each boot-up, or whether the user must do so manually.

A manual startup is convenient during development of the driver: if your driver crashes on startup, a manual startup avoids that your driver gets started automatically when you reboot the machine, and crashes it again. In command line mode, the driver is always installed as "auto-start after boot".

In command line mode, you pass the name of the driver (preferably including its full path) and one or more options on the command line.

The options are: /i install the driver /m copy the driver file to the "drivers" directory of Microsoft Windows; this is useful for creating a driver update on a diskette or in a ZIP archive. /u remove (uninstall) the driver /c show a confirmation message after a successful installation or removal (only when combined with /i or /u) /s silent: no popup messages in case of errors /? shows a help screen and then exits; other command line parameters are ignored

Example: regdrv /i /c c:\graphapp\drivers\VRetrace.sys

In command line mode with the "/i" option, REGDRV installs the driver in "auto start" mode, so that the driver is automatically started after each reboot. If the driver already exists, REGDRV stops and removes the driver first and then proceeds installation (in effect, it "refreshes" the driver).

If an error occurs in command line mode and neither the options "/c" or "/s" were set, REGDRV switches to interactive mode. The "/s" option skips any message boxes on error; the "/c" option shows a confirmation box, in the style of "The driver 'VRetrace' was successfully installed", on success. Both of these options disable the "dropping back" to interactive mode.