Rescaning for new Hard Disks using Device Manager. What command gets called in background?

Question

_{Wednesday, December 3, 2008 10:38 PM}

Hello,

Out of all the ways of performing hardware rescans within Windows, I found the Server Manager rescan functionality in W2K8 (Server Manager => Disk Drives => Scan for hardware changes) to be the most reliable way of performing a rescan for new LUNs.  Does anyone know the command(s) performed behind the scenes by Server Manager when it performs a "Scan for hardware changes"?

I would like to automate the ability to rescan my Windows 2008 system in the same reliable fashion.

*BTW: I tried the Diskpart rescan and it didn't give me the same desirable results as the Server Manager scan does...
*
Thanks in advance for your time and any input.

• Nigel

All replies (1)

_{Friday, December 5, 2008 9:22 AM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Hi Nigel,

You may consider using a free download utility called "DevCon", which allows full command-line access to Device manager. The DevCon is a command-line utility that acts as an alternative to Device Manager. By using DevCon, we can enable, disable, restart, rescan, update, remove, and query individual devices or groups of devices.

Download: The DevCon command-line utility functions as an alternative to Device Manager

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q311272

After we unzip the DevCon utility to Windows Server 2008, we can run the following command to perform the same action just as we click "Scan for hardware changes" in device manager.

Devcon rescan

*** ***

Hope it helps.

David Shen - MSFT