I was about to board a Southwest flight last night, when the Scanner and Camera Wizard error dialog suddenly popped up on top of the boarding group display (see picture).  I know people who like to take pictures of things like this, and to be honest I have been doing it myself lately, but I really didn’t know what to do with them.   Then I thought about this being a teachable moment, how can we prevent this from occurring on systems that we manage?   I am not sure exactly how to get to this point.   But I can guess, I think that one of the Southwest employees probably plugged their smartphone into the computer that controls this display (probably to charge it.  Reminds me of the time that one of the judges on Americas Got Talent unplugged the shows judging buttons to charge her phone.) There are actually a few things wrong in the picture: The Explorer shell and start bar a running.  That means that someone can always figure out a way to jump on the sys ...

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I recently needed to create and format a disk partition from a batch file.  To make this more fun, I needed to run the batch file from a USB disk which mounted as the D drive, but I needed the new partition to be the D drive when finished. in the interest of full disclosure, there are other ways to do this, but I wanted to do it from a batch file because I was doing other things from batch files at the time – so this method fit in. I started this by doing running diskpart and learning what could do and how to do it.  To start I knew that I needed to create disk 0 partition 2 and format it with NTFS.  The commands in diskpart are: select disk 0 create partition primary noerr select part 2 format fs=ntfs label=Data quick These command create and partition disk 0 partition 2 and format the disk.  But what I found is that the USB disk was the D drive and the new partition was the F driver, not what I want.   But if before creating the partition, I ch ...

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I was installing a driver over and over, and thought that there must be a better way than going to the device manager.  Well, it turns out that there is.

The plug and play utility (pnputil.exe) is designed for this purpose.   The following installs from an INF named mydriver.inf.

pnputil.exe -i -a "c:\OEM\mydrive.inf"

Which I included in the following batch file, which copies the driver to a folder on the C drive, installs the driver, then reboots if the user agrees.

@echo off

xcopy /s /e /q /Y /I OEM c:\OEM

pnputil.exe -i -a "c:\OEM\mydrive.inf"

echo.
echo.
echo A reboot is necessary for these changes to take effect.
echo.
set /p input= "Reboot Now (Y/N)?"

echo %input%
IF "%input%"=="y" goto :REBOOT
IF "%input%"=="Y" goto :REBOOT
goto :EOF

:REBOOT
shutdown /r /t 0

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