Hardware Install Apps Packaging

[SMistlebauer]

I have had nothing but problems when it comes to repackaging drivers and software for hardware installs. Is there some tips or best practices on this? Is there some settings or something that I need to make sure are set before doing snapshots? I'm currently looking at other packaging software to see if they're any better. Any assistance on this would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Scott M.

[DavidLock]

Yup. Hardware and drivers are on the blacklist for installations. I don't believe changing to a different repackaging project would help you.

The problem is that specs of the hardware/drivers in the registry tend to be machine specific and are dynamically generated. The hardware keys in the registry are dynamicaly generated at each reboot.

However, there is beta going on at the moment for the Windows Installer device driver framework (I'll post a link later when I can get access to my e-mail) and there is going to be support for this in Installshield. So that might make things better in future.

A lot of people do get drivers/hardware stuff to work but it is a lot more work. Often you have to resort to custom actions to do some of the installation. For instance, devcon.exe is a command line tool for the device manager. You can call this with a custom action and an inf file.

[SMistlebauer]

Thanks for the info David. I wouldn't mind being a Beta tester for them. I was able to package the Webcam driver software successfully with Wise Package Studio 5.1. I'm still trying to get a successful package with InstallShield. I found that there is a default.ini in the repackager that I modified to allow the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ not to be excluded. My first attempt failed but I was a lot closer. Taking another stab at it now. Keep me posted on anything else you come accross on this subject please. Thanks again.

[DavidLock]

You can change the exclusion file, but that will change it for all packages. Sometimes it is better just to use something like Active Registry Monitor to monitor the changes in the registry and then import those excluded extras as reg file into your package.

I like to keep a strict exclusion list and then work out any problems manually if they do appear.