Fun with WMIC

(When preparing to write this brief post, I see that my MVP colleague Sherry Kissinger also has a post on WMIC and Windows Installer. Check it out – it’s a good read too.) 

Here are a couple more examples to add to your tool belt, especially when working with teammates in remote offices, and you need information from WinPE. My perfect example is that a tech reports in that OSD isn’t working, the symptom is that no fixed disks appear to be present on the system. This error usually means that you don’t have a mass storage driver in WinPE for the hardware. Of course, this error can also mean that you have a hard disk error, or that it’s not connected to your system.

Back to task, here are two example command lines for querying win32_pnpentity to display all Plug-and-Play information for a system.

Wmic /namespace:\\ROOT\cimv2 path win32_pnpentity get /format:hform >”c:\temp\data.htm”

Wmic /namespace:\\ROOT\cimv2 path win32_pnpentity get /format:csv >”c:\temp\test.csv”

The first example writes the information to a .htm file, and the second writes the information to a .csv file.

Once you have the PNP IDs, you can begin your journey to find the appropriate mass storage drivers.

More info: Creating and editing formats in WMIC.

Greg