O/S Deployment Thread, Sysprep - hard drive drivers in Technical; Strange one here. I've built a Sysprep image in a virtual machine, and most of the drivers install and the ...
Strange one here. I've built a Sysprep image in a virtual machine, and most of the drivers install and the HALs seem to work and everything. Fine. Except for, strangely, the hard drive. Sysprep goes through Mini-setup, does everything it's meant to do, installs all the drivers I've added (such as mass storage devices and chipset drivers)... but the hard drive has a yellow exclamation mark next to it in Device Manager.
Obviously the hard drive is working fine, as I'm in Windows.
I've used a Sysprep image previously, but haven't installed drivers as a part of it - they've been done through Acronis True Image's Universal Restore, and I've not seen this issue before. Now I'm using FOG instead, and wanted to automate deployment as much as possible.
Yup, there are, and on the finished sysprep.inf they're all still there, following only by the [sysprepcleanup] section (for whatever reason, the sysprep folder isn't deleted after mini-setup runs).
Mind PMing me a copy of your sysprep.inf (not sure if the problem is in there, but worth a look) - if so obviously take out any personal data such as your product key.
Not a problem. Attached it to the post should anyone else want to see it.
I know the line in the file says no to building the mass storage devices, but that's done separately as part of a batch file (obviously before the main sysprep process starts).
There aren't any mass storage device drivers in there, it looks like mouse and keyboard drivers. It's been a while since I set up mine but I think I manually entered what I needed, I think I just added entries for various Intel ICH controllers on the end of what it generated from -bmsd.
-bmsd should create a lot of entries (five or six hundred lines), then if you want to add your own you can just add them at the end like this:
Thinking about it further I don't think the you actually need the driver in the mass storage section unless your deployed images fails to boot, if you get past that stage it would install along with any other pnp drivers during the mini-setup.
You'll have to setup sysprep to install all required drivers from within the image, I normally put them in C:\sysprep\drivers so they get deleted at the end of the deployment and then use the sysprep driver scanner from here before running sysprep.
There aren't any mass storage device drivers in there[...]
I mentioned that the bmsd section was added later (as part of the batch file I fire sysprep off from), and it too seems to work. The mass storage drivers don't appear to be the issue - they're installing fine - it's the hard drive itself which is giving a driver error!
Originally Posted by morganw
Thinking about it further I don't think the you actually need the driver in the mass storage section unless your deployed images fails to boot, if you get past that stage it would install along with any other pnp drivers during the mini-setup.
You'll have to setup sysprep to install all required drivers from within the image, I normally put them in C:\sysprep\drivers so they get deleted at the end of the deployment and then use the sysprep driver scanner from here before running sysprep.
Yup, that was all done anyway and it seems to work fine. It installs graphics drivers, mass storage drivers, everything.
I thought it might have been a conflict with the custom XP CD which I used to make the image file originally, which included a few basic drivers, but I've tried it with a stock XP CD, so the only drivers are those offered on the XP CD and those I inject in the sysprep process, but that gives the hard drive driver issue too.
Sorry I mis-read it a bit and thought it was the drive controller not showing up, i've never seen a drive even require drivers, I think it's more likely to be something left over from building the image in a virtual machine. You might have to remove any drive controllers from device manager before running sysprep, easiest way to check this though would be to try making a sysprep image on a physical PC. Older ACPI uniprocessor ones seem to put you in a better position (supports HAL switching to ACPI mutliprocessor and they normally don't normally require additional drivers for network cards or drive controllers).
OK, I tried a new approach this morning. I had been following the Sysprep guide on the FOG wiki, which combines various scripts with Sysprep. This morning I sort of merged part of that guide with the examples at Vernalex and that issue has disappeared!
Many thanks to both of you for your help.
As I always like examples when I'm searching for help, for reference's sake, I've attached the three files I used (sysprep.inf, hwid.cmd and sysprep.bat) to script my sysprep process. Obviously I've not included sysprep itself or the driver folder I used.
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Originally Posted by Hightower 
