Device Installations and System Restarts

Device installations should not force the user to restart the system unless absolutely necessary. The following circumstances are the only ones for which a system restart should be necessary:

• Installing or removing a non-Plug and Play device

  For these earlier devices, a user typically must shut down the system before physically adding or removing the device. After the power is turned back on, the system starts.

  Note

  The device's setup files should not initiate a system restart, regardless of whether the user installs the drivers before or after plugging in the hardware.

• Updating a driver for a system boot device

  If a device can potentially hold the system's paging, hibernation, or crash dump file, its drivers must service IRP_MN_DEVICE_USAGE_NOTIFICATION requests. The system sends this request before putting one of these files on the disk. If the drivers succeed the request, they must fail any subsequent IRP_MN_QUERY_REMOVE_DEVICE requests. When a driver for the device fails an IRP_MN_QUERY_REMOVE_DEVICE request, the system prompts the user to restart the system.

  Note

  The device's setup files should not initiate a system restart.

• Installing a non-WDM filter driver

  If a filter driver is added to a non-WDM driver stack, the system must be restarted. In this case, the driver's installer should request a system restart (see Initiating System Restarts During Device Installations).

  Note

  Adding a filter driver to a WDM driver stack does not require a system restart, unless an underlying device is a system boot device.

In this section

Avoiding System Restarts during Device Installations

Initiating System Restarts During Device Installations