RIS and Drivers

[eejit]

I'm playing with RIS at the moment which is going fine, but I want just one image for all hardware.

I know that I can copy the drivers to the local hard drive using $oem$\$1\drivers and reference it using the oemPnpDriversPath but because I want just one image, there would be a lot of wastage as I'd be copying across drivers that I don't need for a particular system - so I just copy the NIC drivers information, and add them to the i386 folder where necessary.

I have made a drivers share on the server that I want the RIS build to connect to during the install.

I've added a "cmdlines.txt" file to merge a regsitry entry which alters the "DevicePath" to include "\\servername\drivers$" along with %SystemRoot%\Inf.

When Windows boots up after the RIS build, it has quite a few unknown devices. Checking the registry confirms that the DevicePath is correct, so if I delete all of the "Unknown Devices" in Device Manager and re-scan for devices it finds them all and installs the drivers.

So, I need to know why Windows doesn't use those drivers during the build - or I need to know a command to tell windows to "Re-scan for drivers" or something.

Can anyone help with this?

[E1uSiV3]

Drivers dont tend to be that big to be honest so i just copied the whole lot, that was for 3 manufacturers and about 10 diff hardware types in total.

[eejit]

Ok, it's about 182Mb at the moment including laptop drivers too, which is not too bad. But, this is sticking in my craw now, so it's going to bug me until I get a solution

[ajbritton]

If your network driver is one of those that is is loaded during PnP device detection, then it stands to reason that Windows won't have access to the network until that has happened. I don't know what order drivers are detected/installed, but it seems to me that it's going to be very tricky to get this working. You could try a script which runs after the network is up and running, which deletes all unknown devices and forces a redetection. Also, you would need to make sure the computer has access to the files on the share. Try adding the 'Domain Computers' group to the root of the share.

[eejit]

Cheers AJ. No, I add the network drivers in the normal fashion as I mentioned in my first post. The network cards are never one of the missing drivers. The computer has full access to the share too, so I don't think that's the problem. How would you script a deletion of existing drivers? I wouldn't even begin to know how to do that, if you could point me in the right direction, that would be great.

Thanks.

[ChrisH]

Check out the driver packs and the methods used at http://www.driverpacks.net/ the drivers are copied over in a compressed format then uncompressed later. Im using them and they find about 95 % of my hardware at the moment.

[ajbritton]

Cheers AJ. No, I add the network drivers in the normal fashion as I mentioned in my first post. The network cards are never one of the missing drivers. The computer has full access to the share too, so I don't think that's the problem. How would you script a deletion of existing drivers? I wouldn't even begin to know how to do that, if you could point me in the right direction, that would be great.

Thanks.

Have a look at the Windows Setup Timeline. If I understand correctly, the driver you copy into the i386 folder is only used by Text-Mode Setup. Once the PC reboots and goes into the GUI-Mode Setup, the driver is no longer loaded. Devices are then detected, but BEFORE the network is installed. This would mean that when device detection takes place, there is no network connection.

I tend to agree with Chris and Elusiv on this one. Bung all the drivers in $oem$ and copy them down to the C: drive. If space on C: drive is a problem, you could always delete the drivers once installation is complete.

[eejit]

This is driving me nuts

I don't want to copy the drivers across as I'm almost there. Deleting the unknown devices and rebooting sorts it all out. I'll try to find a way to automate that (In the old win98 days you could just delete the ENUM folder from the registry, but XP is a little fussy about that)

Thanks for the tips though guys.