Monday morning I brought (rather I biked) my laptop back into the office after reformatting and installing Windows Server 2008 on it. FolderShare seems to be holding up rather well, but I ran into an unexpected issue, no Bluetooth. Not just no Bluetooth drivers, there is no bluetooth support in Server 2008.

Thankfully I found a good guide written by Gill that explains how he installed the Microsoft Bluetooth stack on windows server 2008. His guide, and a comment by Crispin Wright, was what I needed to get Bluetooth running on my HP nx9420 business class laptop.

First I followed Gill’s steps for coping the files to a temp folder and changing the INF files. The following list of files I was unable to find in the folder specified, but it turns out they were in the folder created by HP’s Bluetooth driver setup (kind of following Crispin’s instructions for his dell).

• btwaudio.inf
• btwaudio.sys
• btwavdt.inf
• btwavdt.sys
• btwrchild.inf
• btwrchid.sys

I also wrote a powershell scrip to go thru and modify the .inf files.

#Executes a find and replace on all files in the path $includes
#You can pass in a path with a wild card (c:\temp\*.txt)
#Credit: http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/03/powershell-replace-string-function.html 

function Replace-String($find, $replace, $includes)
{
get-childitem $includes | 
  select-string $find -list |
  % { (get-content $_.Path) |
  % { $_ -replace $find, $replace } |
  set-content $_.Path }
} 

#Actual find replace for blue tooth inf files
Replace-String "amd64...1" "amd64...3" ".\*.inf"

One thing I do was run the HP provided INF files thru the Powershell script as well before I could get the drivers to update. The device I updated first in the Device Manager was the HP Integrated module with a hardware id of USB\VID_03F0&PID_171D&REV_0100. Once this device was updated, then the other blue tooth devices were found, and I just pointed them to my temp BT folder with the updated INF files.

I still have one unknown device, and it appears to be for the Bluethooth PAN profile, but I have been unable to find a driver for it. I thought that I would try running the setup application provided by HP to install their drivers, but even after that, I was still left with that unknown device, so I would recommend not running the HP setup program, as it appears to provide no added benefit.

While installing my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I was prompted for drivers, and again, pointed to my temp BT folder to install the HID drivers. I’ve since rebooted a couple of times, and my mouse and keyboard continue to work. I don’t have any other Bluetooth devices to test at this time.

UPDATE:

Looks like I was in a hurry and missed coping the bthpan.inf file in the first step. Gill asked me to take a look again, and sure enough, I hadn’t copied it to my BT temp folder, so it never got updated. Once I made the change, I was able to get the PAN driver installed.

Thanks again Gill.