[wds] Intel 6 Series Motherboards and WDS Problem

[FragglePete]

We've run into a bit of a problem - and it would appear that Intel have acknowledged the issue.

 

Stone Computers have given us a valuation machine to try things out on - this is so we can test our image and make sure all is ok. We use WDS to install Windows 7 and as normal do a PXE boot with F12. The machine boots initially and all seems well until you get to the screen with the initial 3 options, with the first being to Run the Deployment Wizard to install a new OS. Soon as we click this we get an error saying "A connection to the deployment share (Server path) could not be made." This indicates no Windows 7 driver for the network card can be found. So, we've had this before and you just need to inject the correct drivers into the Toolkit and rebuild the boot image. Except in this case it doesnt work!

 

The device ID in the .inf file does not match the Device ID of the network card! I've been bashing my head against the wall trying to sort this. Frustratingly we can build the machine straight from the Windows 7 DVD and install the drivers manually and it works, but just refuses to accept the driver for the card when using WDS.

 

Stone have been really helpfully in trying to solve this issue, they have replaced the motherboard to different models but still no luck. Working with the Technical Manager it would appear (and Intel have now confirmed) that there is an issue with all the 6 Series motherboards! Be it a driver issue or a BIOS issue, this seems to have kicked a bit of a hornets nest with Stone and Intel.

 

Has anybody else got WDS working with these boards? The model we have at the moment is DQ670W, but we have had the DH61 also but either don't work.

 

Nightmare!

 

Pete

Edited September 2, 2011 by ZeroHour

[PeterW]

Which H61 board have you tried?

What device id do you have for the card?

What BIOS version is the DQ67OW on?

Edited June 17, 2011 by PeterW

[SYNACK]

Oh, these use the intel 825xxx bla bla bla Gigabit ethernet cards don't they?

 

If so we have had this exact problem with a dirty Toshiba laptop where they have this card but a different PnP ID. To fix it to run on WDS I spent four hours digging through old driver versions and eventually found the right one off the hp site. This is a known fault with Intel's excremental driver quality.

 

The other thing to watch for if you have these cards is that they are set to 'wait for link' in the driver, we have to update the driver to the latest one after build then apply this setting for them to reliably pick up network after a reboot.

 

PM me if it is these cards as I can hopefully dig out the driver for you, I also have a reg key to force the 'wait for link' setting. Once these things are sorted they work alright, it's just a big hassel..

 

Edit: Intel® 82579LM Gigabit Ethernet Controller - I was right, same card with probably the same issue. I'd post the reg key but I posted it here so logicly I now can't find it.

Edited June 17, 2011 by SYNACK

[SYNACK]

Found it, http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/74883-intel-82578dm-nic-only-connects-after-cold-boot.html although it does mean that I was wrong in having the driver for it already. It is probably a simmilar issue though with the secondary PNPID not specified for WinPE properly in the driver. I'd just try a bunch of versions, copy down the PNPID that WDS sees and then do a text search in the extracted drivers at each version level to see which INF contains them and then you can try injecting just that one.

 

We had to wipe all other intel drivers for NICs out first then slowly put them back one by one.

[PeterW]

We had to wipe all other intel drivers for NICs out first then slowly put them back one by one.

 

Nice

[FragglePete]

We had to wipe all other intel drivers for NICs out first then slowly put them back one by one.

 

Oh Cripes! Not happy - really don't want to do that. We're running out of time now; just got informed that any ordering has to be completed before 30th June this year due to us going over the Academy Status so won't be able to pay suppliers for a bit after that date. Great!

 

May just fall back to older chipsets for now. There is only so much time I can spend on this!

 

Pete

[PeterW]

Which driver have you tried injecting, the one from the 16.3 package?

[FragglePete]

Which driver have you tried injecting, the one from the 16.3 package?

 

Several - tried 16.3 (and 16.2) and I think I've tried something like 15.7 as a suggestion from Stone. Still no joy. Hats off to Stone, they appear to be working over time on a solution but I really don't want to start removing Intel drivers from our image - but if that what it takes!

 

Pete

[Arthur]

I don't know if it's related, but Intel's NIC drivers have another issue which is worth mentioning...

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2011/06/17/blank-monitors-are-dropping-my-calls.aspx

[dude10028]

Had a similar problem with Intel DH61 series where WDS would not capture image back to WDS server (network driver had not loaded or network not initialised). To work around this used the instructions in the following Error message when you start a PXE client to connect to a WDS server on a Windows Server 2003 SP1-based computer or on a Windows Server 2008-based computer&#58 &#34WdsClient&#58 An error occurred while starting networking&#34

While there was not error in the log file we were able to manually load the driver (in this case with driver CD copied to USB was drvload f:\pro1000\winx64\ndis62\elc62x64.inf) and perform initialise - got ip etc. and was then able to continue with the capture process.

 

Hope this helps

Andy

[andyturpie]

Can I just chip in to say, we had this type of issue on an RM CC3 Network with a Viglen test workstation and had to revert a different mainboard for any success

[dude10028]

Work around (see previous post) was good for capture but not deploy as error message appears but even if drivers manually added clicking OK to error just reboots device. Was considering applying image manually with big hdd and imagex (there were only 6 x devices with this hardware) but gave adding drivers to boot image one more go and it worked. The difference was instead of using Add Driver Package with 'All packages from a folder', the 'Driver packages from inf' was used and only the specific known working driver added (to a new driver group). Boot image was then updated re-adding all available drivers and it worked. Maybe this made a difference, maybe it was just adding the driver in a certain order or maybe it was just my lucky day - who knows?

[tommej]

I'm having the same issue with these NIC's now in lenovo m90z's. I injected all the drivers manually to our capture image and it worked fine.

 

Now trying to deploy and getting the error message about nic drivers not being installed. THEY'RE THE SAME GOD DAMN DRIVERS JUST WORK

[tommej]

Ok this is driving me insane, how Can I get a deploy image to use these drivers correctly?

[tommej]

I've now installed all of the 116 drivers included in the intel generic driver download. Still no joy.

 

What a joke.

[SYNACK]

Intel's drivers can be very low quality and it is a case of hopeing that you can get ones that work (and removing newer ones that don't from contention) or spend time cleaning up intels mess manually. The other option is to make a custom image then sysprep it with the don't remove PnP drivers option in an answer file then use various other means to drop this image on the hardware.

 

true

[tommej]

The driver within the image i'm applying is fine. It's the winPE boot images that don't seem to recognize the driver correctly. More specifically the deploy boot image.

 

I've managed to capture the image fine.

 

I'm about ready to break things trying to sort this out.

[dude10028]

Not sure if my experiences were the same but maybe this will help...?

 

Find out exactly which drivers you need off the Intel driver disk. Best way to do this is create new capture boot image with no drivers, boot using this then follow link in earlier post for instructions on manually adding a driver from the inf. In my case this was using the NDIS2 driver. When you have the one that works add this specific one to your WDS drivers and be sure to add this single driver to a new driver group. Next create a new boot image from original media (i.e without any drivers) and then add drivers to this image but filter these by driver group so only the single known working Intel driver is added. This new boot image should then work fine. Well, done this on two separate WDS implementations with two different Intel Pro 1000 NIC's and it worked fine both times.

 

Good luck

[jamesmay]

the intel 16.5 drivers when added in make it work!

[CU-Murty]

After putting up a beautiful new WDS server and convincing my network techs to give it a try in place of our out dated Ghosting process, we went to try it on one of our main production desktops (Dell Optiplex 790) and low and behold I ran into this same issue I am seeing here, though in my case it's specifically with the Intel 82579 LM NIC. I loaded the drive that Win7 works just fine with into MDT, and once booting into Lite Touch it gives the dreaded, cannot connect to DeploymentShare message because the NIC driver did not load. I've spent the better part of a day digging around forums, found all kinds of people having the same issue, some hints at a resolution, but never final solutions.

 

I found one work around, it's not the greatest way to go, but I like it better than some of the other options I have come across, so I thought I would share it with y'all. Basically, once in Lite-Touch, I go to the command prompt, and run a batch file I store on a thumb drive with all the driver files, that batch manually installs the drive, initializes the network, and reloads the Lite-Touch WinPE environment so you can proceed with the deployment process. I'll outline it in more depth below:

 

First, go out and get the latest Intel Drivers for your NIC from Intel directly for Win7. Unpack PROWin32.exe, drill down to PROWin32\PRO1000\Win32. In this folder you will see groups of five files (.cat, .din, .inf, sys, and .dll) that relate to the driver you need as well as a handful of more generic driver files that start with Nic (such as NicInstC.dll), I'll be using e1c6232 files + all the extra files.

 

I took a blank thumb drive, copied my file five e1c6232 files and all the generic driver files out of the folder mentioned above, to the thumb drive. Then, I made a batch file with the following lines in it:

 

drvload.exe e1c6232.inf

wpeutil.exe InitializeNetwork

wpeinit.exe

 

Saved that batch file to the root of the thumb drive where all the NIC files are.

 

Finally, I PXE boot the computer to the WDS server like normal with the thumb drive plugged in, only when I get to the GUI, I choose Exit to Command Prompt. At the command prompt, navigate to F: (should be the drive of the USB stick) and run my batch file. The batch file loads the driver, initializes the network, and then relaunches the WinPE GUI. From here you should be able to choose to proceed with Windows Deployment, only this time you won't get the error message about the NIC not working.

 

I really wish I could find a way to get it working properly, but short of that, this seems like the simplest work around I could find. I will probably make a few of these thumb sticks for my network techs and they'll just have to keep one handy whenever they want to work on 790s, thankfully we don't have any labs with 790s and we're about to move on to the next model, but dag-nabbit this bug really irks me.

 

Anyways, hope that helps.

[CU-Murty]

Well.. I spoke too soon, got past the NIC driver errors... now I am getting a "Unable to create system partition error" when I get to the Win7 setup GUI, not sure what is going on now and I am running out of time before the weekend to do much more testing. I will report back when I figure this out.

[apeman]

You need to add your network drivers and sata ahci drivers to your MDT server and then update the deployment share and rebuild the boot image and then re-add this to your WDS server.

[Drecchia]

Did anyone ever figure this out? I have a Lenovo T430 with an Intel 82579LM nic in it.

 

I have the capture image running but I cannot make the deploy work. I can manually load e1c6232.inf and it gets an IP address. But if i inject that driver into the boot image it does not work.

 

Anyone have a hint?

[SYNACK]

Did anyone ever figure this out? I have a Lenovo T430 with an Intel 82579LM nic in it.

 

I have the capture image running but I cannot make the deploy work. I can manually load e1c6232.inf and it gets an IP address. But if i inject that driver into the boot image it does not work.

 

Anyone have a hint?

 

I think asus has an update utility that fixes this intel screwup on their boards, it reports the nic wrongly by default causing the issue with drivers not finding it. The z77 pro boards were the ones i found it under.

[Drecchia]

I see that now, thanks, but hopefully this isn't the only thing to do here. With this I'd have to run it on all 300 machines before I tried to image them if I'm reading it correctly.