> Microsoft's documentation on this is not as good as it could be

When I wanted to learn and understand this stuff back in the NT days, I went 
straight to the Custer(Russinovich)(Solomon book). I have quite a stack of them 
now.

The knowledge within is not available anywhere else in such a concise 
fashion....if you can call a 1500pg tome concise that is. Still priceless IMO.

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Ben Scott
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2014 9:24 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [spam] [dkim-failure] Re: [NTSysADM] move hdd with windows 7 on it

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 9:14 AM, Steven M. Caesare <[email protected]> wrote:
> While the shotgun approach of nuking _EVERY_ driver in the system 
> might solve the _SPECIFIC_ issue of this being a boot device access issue ...

  Since this has come up twice now...

  What you see in "Device Manager" are not drivers.  They're objects in the PNP 
manager's device enumeration list.  Removing objects from Dev Mgr does not 
remove the driver.

  The actual device drivers are considered "Services" internally, and are 
mostly managed by the same Service Control Manager that manages the "regular" 
services one sees in the "Services" control panel/MMC.

  Said drivers (and other services) are enumerated in the registry under 
<HKLM\System\Current Control Set\Services>.  Not all of these drivers appear in 
Device Manager, even when they're running.

  Drivers set to boot start will always be loaded, regardless of whether a 
device node exists in the PNP tree (because the drivers are loaded before the 
PNP manager is available, by the NT loader).

  I believe it's the PNP manager that normally decides to set a driver to boot 
start, although I don't fully understand the mechanism.  I don't know what 
rules the PNP manager has (if any) for setting boot start drivers back to 
system/demand.

  The main reason to manually remove a PNP device node to fix a boot problem 
after a system move would be to disable a device driver that's causing problems 
with hardware on the new system.  For example, the driver may be trying to load 
or probe the wrong hardware, causing said hardware to get confused.  Or maybe 
the driver is getting confused and crashing/corrupting the running system.

  And it's certainly the case that none of this has anything to do with the 
HAL, which is it's own beast.  If someone still doesn't believe this, go look 
under the "Services" regkey.  You won't find the HAL there.

  Microsoft's documentation on this is not as good as it could be (it's 
scattered about, and some things are very under-documented), but here are some 
starting points:

"QUERY_SERVICE_CONFIG structure"
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms684950.aspx&k=4%2BViHuL0UtSJBpVrYi3EdQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Jek3QSvahmIrNAN1nuPfQA%3D%3D%0A&m=hvGX7wHMlmAe9GzOFx7hSyb1cZjfhGSCXVXvizGQyX8%3D%0A&s=3bf7f4654c620427ba570aa8ef71f101bb45f9432192371479131adf976d7df0

"Specifying Driver Load Order"
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff552319.aspx&k=4%2BViHuL0UtSJBpVrYi3EdQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Jek3QSvahmIrNAN1nuPfQA%3D%3D%0A&m=hvGX7wHMlmAe9GzOFx7hSyb1cZjfhGSCXVXvizGQyX8%3D%0A&s=453f3fe523c7ef8a73edd553f9ae378bf87e73eec580d307a99a00247781a2dd

"Windows Kernel-Mode HAL Library"
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff565727.aspx&k=4%2BViHuL0UtSJBpVrYi3EdQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Jek3QSvahmIrNAN1nuPfQA%3D%3D%0A&m=hvGX7wHMlmAe9GzOFx7hSyb1cZjfhGSCXVXvizGQyX8%3D%0A&s=961c2e755c766f6a2b6462b318dd5492c2a9274959793f034206891d2698c2d2

-- Ben




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