Getting a list of installed hardware devices

[Adam Athari]

Hi,
Is there a way to programatically query Windows to see if a particular device is installed or not.

And is there a way to tell windows to load or unload a driver?

Thanks

Adam

[FrozenKnight]

CM_Get_Device_ID_List

hope that helps. only took about a min of searching on msdn.

[adeyblue]

You can probably modify this example to check if your device is installed. The example gives the friendly names though not device ids. Generally you'll want to look through the setup api for this sort of thing.

Since drivers are handled by the service control manager, you might be able to use StartService to start / load a driver and ControlService with SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP to stop / unload it. EDIT: Yep it's possible, this code unloads the beep driver before loading it again:

Code

GeSHi (cpp):
#include <windows.h>
 
int main()
{
    SC_HANDLE scM = OpenSCManager(NULL, SERVICES_ACTIVE_DATABASE, SC_MANAGER_ALL_ACCESS);
    if(scM)
    {
        SC_HANDLE beep = OpenService(scM, "beep", SERVICE_ALL_ACCESS);
        if(beep)
        {
            SERVICE_STATUS status = {0};
            ControlService(beep, SERVICE_CONTROL_STOP, &status);
            Sleep(5000);
            StartService(beep, 0, NULL);
            CloseServiceHandle(beep);
        }
        CloseServiceHandle(scM);
  }
}
 
Created by GeSHI 1.0.7.18