Build a Windows Driver Index

[Kasius]

Greetings, all,

At my workplace, we have created a central store for all of our device drivers. It is shared out via DFS and includes just .INF files and the associated driver system files. Currently, we have the Windows automatic driver search looking in this share to find drivers. The problem is that we have nearly 6GB of drivers out there, and it can take incredibly long for a Windows client to read through all of the .INF files and find the one it wants to use. We have a hell of a lot of sites, and not every site has a file server to use as a DFS point. So most of them are getting the drivers via very slow connections back to our main site.

I know that Windows databases drivers that are stored in its local driver store. Some of the database files are INFCACHE.0, DRVINDEX.DAT, INFSTOR.DAT, etc. Is there any way to generate a database of the drivers on our store that Windows clients can review instead of reading every .INF file? I have done a lot of research, but I cannot find anything that does what I'm looking for.

Thanks in advance for any help!