SCSI Miniport Drivers

This section contains the following information:

Supporting Plug and Play in a SCSI Miniport Driver

Registry Entries for Plug and Play SCSI Miniport Drivers

Restrictions on SCSI Miniport Drivers that Manage the Boot Drive

Error Handling in SCSI Miniport Drivers

Required and Optional SCSI Miniport Driver Routines

SCSI miniport drivers for NT-based operating systems are HBA-specific but operating system-independent. That is, each miniport driver links itself with the system-supplied SCSI port driver, which is a dynamic-link library (DLL), and calls only the port driver's ScsiPortXxx routines to communicate with the system and its HBA. Such SCSI miniport drivers run on other Microsoft operating systems that support Microsoft Win32 applications and also export the ScsiPortXxx routines. For more information about the ScsiPortXxx routines, see SCSI Port Library Routines.

Note that any SCSI miniport driver that calls routines other than the ScsiPortXxx cannot run in both Microsoft operating system environments. To remain portable across Microsoft Windows systems, including NT-based operating systems, SCSI miniport drivers must call only the system-supplied ScsiPortXxx.

A SCSI miniport driver can be a Plug and Play driver, or it can run as a legacy driver that does not participate in Plug and Play operations such as resource redistribution or power management. The primary differences between a Plug and Play and a legacy miniport driver are the order in which initialization routines are called and enforcement of certain restrictions that were applied to miniport drivers in Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, but not enforced.

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Build date: 2/12/2014