Consider the scenario where you want to deploy a basic print driver to your clients but the vendor only offers a full package installer for a given printer. One possible solution is to install the full driver on a reference system, then export the print driver for installing it on other clients. Here is how to do that.
- After the full driver is installed on the reference system, run this command from an administrative Terminal (PowerShell or Command Prompt):
pnputil -e- This will display a list of all the 3rd party drivers in use on your system. Look for the one that matches your printer. Once identified, make a note of the INF file for the driver. We’ll use the name oem6.inf for our example.
- Change directory to a new empty folder where you’d like to store the extracted driver files and run this command:
pnputil /export-driver oem6.inf .- In the above command, dot (.) is used as a reference to the current folder. Alternatively, you could replace the dot with any full path to where you’d like to extract the driver files.
- Once extracted, bundle up / copy the driver files to a new system and install them with this command:
rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /q /ia /f oem6.inf /m "MODEL NAME"- In the above command, “MODEL NAME” is found by opening the oem6.inf file and locating the name of the model referenced in the file. In the case of the Sharp Universal Print Driver 3 PCL 6 driver, this was found in the [Strings] section on a property named “Model1”:
[Strings]
oem="SHARP"
Model1="SHARP UD3 PCL6"- In that case, I would list “SHARP UD3 PCL6” in place of “MODEL NAME” in the example above.