Installing Drivers on Windows Server Core

If you’ve installed Windows 2008 R2 Server Core and need to install the network drivers, you’ll need to do that from the command line. There is no graphical interface, so you will need to prepare a little to install your drivers.

Here are the steps:

• You’ll need admin rights to do this, so make sure you have rights
• Copy the drivers folder from the installation media, CD/DVD or file (we’ll assume it’s the NIC card) to a folder in C, like C:\Drivers\LAN\
• Navigate to the folder containing the INF files, and type in this command:
• pnputil -i -a C:\Drivers\LAN\filename.inf – where filename.inf is the name of the file containing the driver
• If you’re not sure which file it is, you can use a wildcard, like this: pnputil.exe -i -a C:\Drivers\LAN\*.inf – this will install all INF files.
• You can also do pnputil /? to see all the options

Take a look at the screenshot below.

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~ by ortuno2k on 02/11/2011.