WDS + Realtek

[Chuckster]

I'm in the midst of deploying an unattended Win XP installation for a few workstations and my only stumbling block is the LAN drivers. The ones I have throw up errors when PXE booting stating "The operating system image you selected does not contain the necessary drivers for your network adapter."

It's an onboard LAN and the LAN in question is the Realtek RTL8168D(P)/8111D(P) PCI-E gigabit ethernet NIC.

Can anyone help point me in the direction of obtaining the drivers that will allow me to PXE boot and install the OS remotely by using WDS?

[Bobo]

You need to inject the drivers into the winPE image, you will need to get hold of WAIK and use imagex to mount the boot.wim to inject the drivers.... plenty of detailed guides online, for instance:

How to: Inject drivers into a WDS | WinPE Boot image. Belgium Windows User Group

Edit - or are you having problems even getting to the choices of boot through PXE?

[PeterW]

Is it WDS booting a winpe image for the depolyment or are you using RIS (WDS in legacy mode)?

[Chuckster]

Is it WDS booting a winpe image for the depolyment or are you using RIS (WDS in legacy mode)?

I'm using RIS (WDS in legacy mode). I thought I could already take a folder that is working and just inject the network card drivers into it, but this hasn't worked and I get that error message.

Realtek have been no help.

[PeterW]

Is it a signed driver?

have you done this part ok?

On the RIS server, copy the OEM-supplied .inf and .sys files for the network adapter to the RemoteInstall\Setup\Language\Images\Dir_name\i386 folder. This allows Setup to use the driver during the text-mode portion of the installation.

[Chuckster]

It's all working now. Microsoft suggest that after injecting drivers or creating new images, you must restart the WDS/RIS service in order for it to recognize it. After that, it worked like a charm.

Thanks Peter for all your help and thank you to you too Bobo for your suggestion.