Chapter 13 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Inside Out (Web server address)
Chapter 13 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Inside Out Using Windows Device Drivers Windows Server 2003 includes an extensive library of device drivers for display adapters, disk drives, drive controllers, keyboards, mice and other pointing devices, network adapters, and more. These drivers are maintained in a compressed file called Driver.cab. For i386 systems, this file is located in the %SystemRoot%Driver CacheI386 folder. For Intel Architecture 64 (IA-64) systems, this file is located in the %SystemRoot%Driver CacheIA64 folder. All the drivers in the Driver.cab file are certified to be fully compatible with Windows Server 2003 and are digitally signed by Microsoft to assure you of their authenticity. When you install a new Plug and Play compatible device, Windows checks this file for a compatible device driver. If one is found, the operating system automatically installs the device. Through Windows Update, Microsoft makes updates to the Driver.cab device drivers available for download and installation. Inside Out Installing new drivers All device drivers provided through Windows Update have been thoroughly tested in the Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL), and you should be able to count on them not to cause your system to crash or become unstable. However, just because driver updates are available doesn t mean you should install them. In a production environment, you ll rarely want to download and install new device drivers without thoroughly testing them yourself first. Better safe than sorry always. Typically, you install new device drivers because you are experiencing problems with the old drivers. If you aren t experiencing problems, you might not want to update the drivers. Every hardware driver has an associated Setup Information file. This file ends with the .inf extension and is a text file containing detailed information about the device being installed. The .inf file includes the names of driver files, the location where they are to be installed, version information, Registry settings, and other important configuration information. All devices with drivers included in the Driver.cab file have corresponding .inf files. These files are stored in the %SystemRoot%Inf folder. When you install a new device driver, the driver is written to %SystemRoot%System32Drivers and configuration settings are stored in the Registry. The driver s .inf file is used to control the installation and write the Registry settings. If the driver doesn t already exist in the Driver.cab file (and thus does not already have an .inf file on the system), a copy of the driver s .inf file is written to the %SystemRoot%Inf folder. 378 Part 4: Managing Windows Server 2003 Systems
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