The purpose of this utility is to provide system administrators an easy when to roll out ever-changing Windows 2000 and Windows XP images that use the Microsoft System Preparation Tool (SysPrep) by using this tool to enumerate your Windows drivers. You provide the tool with a base directory path and a extension type.

Then when you tell it to run a scan it will search through that directory along with all subdirectories for files that match your extension. The recommend search is for a SysPrep driver store and with the extension set to inf so that it properly enumerates drivers. It will then only pick up directories that contain those matched files, in this example *.inf files, and then add those settings into the Windows registry so that when the SysPrep mini-setup runs it will search those directories. This program is meant to be run right before the SysPrep resealing is started, so it is suggest you add it to a batch file that has this program precede your sysprep.exe execution. The program also accepts command-line parameters to automate the process.

Please note that this program makes it so you don't need a OemPnPDriversPath line in your sysprep.inf file. In fact, all that line does is copy that data into the registry when it's run. This is a great benefit because the OemPnPDriversPath can only be 4096 bytes, whereas the registry value can be as large as a REG_EXPAND_SZ, so you can have much larger paths this way. In fact there is no direct limit to the size of the registry key, but the key itself can't contain more than 64,000 bytes when combined with the other data values.

You should be aware though that the more paths you provide to SysPrep for the minisetup the longer the Plug and Play detection time because each device needs to scan these directories for relevant INF files. Don't let that worry you though because the INF files are small and unless you have thousands of directories the time should be fairly low.