Win32: Device tree

jschollen has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi all

I'm looking for a way to retrieve the device tree in a windows environment.
I want to use it for device detection, in which the brancing is important.

I'm using windows XP, but the code has also to work on windows 2000 and Windows Vista.

For the moment I'm using WMI functions, but I don't know if that's the way to go.
(I'm having trouble linking different nodes with eachother.)

Can someone help me?

Update:
I found a solution for my problem. (See my own Re^2 for more details).

Comment on Win32: Device tree

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Re: Win32: Device tree by marto (Cardinal) on Aug 21, 2006 at 15:07 UTC
Hi jschollen, Have you taken a look at the Computer Hardware section of Microsoft The Script Center Script Repository? This should at least give you a point of reference regarding the code you already have, or on the other hand, you may pick up some hints from their example scripts. From a compatibility point of view the examples I have looked at work from Windows 98/NT right up to Windows Server 2003. No mention of Vista yet, I am not sure how close Microsoft are to getting Vista out to the masses, you may want to read their documentation (or 'Perform a Google search' ^TM) to find out about Vista WMI support. Hope this helps. Martin	[reply]
Re^2: Win32: Device tree by jschollen (Beadle) on Aug 22, 2006 at 11:44 UTC
Hi Martin, I've been looking thru msdn for quite some time now. The most interesting calls to WMI are: CIM_LogicalDevice or Win32_PnPDevice. Unfortunattely, I miss a lot of mapping, which I can't retrieve with WMI commands. I'm also looking at the windows kernel commands. Apparently "!devnode 01" can do the trick as well, but for now I'm not able to send a windows kernel command with perl. I found out that the WMI commands in the online MSDN libraries are updated (or at least partially) for Windows Vista. Thanks for the advice. Update: Ok, there some problems with the kernel mode, because you have to run an application on 2 pc's. Apperantly the missing link for logical devices bus elements is PDO (Physical Device Objects). These allow me to link the devices uniquely together. PDO's are not guaranteed thru Windows 2000 thru a WMI call. (Or at least, I didn't find one).	[reply]