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.

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.