technogeeky

Nope. It reads the sysprep file to determine which drivers it should load. MSDINST is kind of weird in that it requires that drivers be on the WinPE disc even though the sysprep.inf file obviously wouldn't specifcy a location inside the WinPE disc. I just fake it by coping files on top of the disc (mounted as a ramdrive) but presumably if you had the driver installed on the disc you'd be fine as well.

I'm going to try and see what I can do with some scripting and msdinst.exe from within WinPE. So far, I have it dynamically injecting SATA / RAID drivers into a single plain image (after deploying the image to the hard drive) for two platforms. The sequence is something like: - modify on-disk hive to include path to new driver (stored on disk); save it - modify sysprep to include Device IDs and appropriate INF entries in SysprepMassStorage section - install .sys and .dll files to x:\i386\system386\drivers - install .inf and .cat files to x:\i386\inf (not sure if this is necessary; not sure if cat files are necessary) - run msdinst.exe C:\sysprep\sysprep.inf C:\windows Then when you reboot, SATA will be available before sysprep runs. The full settings for the driver (detecting which hard drives are SATA, configuring them, etc) will take place using standard sysprep PnP detection process. Let me know if you have questions or comments.

Iceman: Thanks for that and all of your patience.

This is what I'm beginning to find out. Is there a way that you're aware of to "inject" a driver into a partition or image like I'm talking about - after sysprep runs initially? I assume it'd involve editing the registry somewhat and putting some drivers in the right places.

The image is sysprepped (repacked?) but it doesn't have all of our drivers inside of it at sysprep pack time. We are replacing the sysprep.ini as part of the deployment process with one that's customized to each particular deployment - where we hoped to specify the SATA drivers. The crux of the problem is that we don't know which drivers we need include in SysprepMassStorage because we have so much varation in our hardware so we were hoping to include certain drivers on a per-deployment level.

Just an addition: Is this a problem that can be worked on with msdinst.exe? drvload.exe? I need to a driver in the "Critical Device Database"?

Hey folks We have some unattended install process already started but I've reached a bit of a problem and can't figure out where to look for answers. We are using Windows PE and LANDesk and some custom scripting to do unattended installs over the network. On machines with SATA drives, we can put the drivers in our PE image or boot in ATA compatability mode. We install the Windows image onto the machine and copy over the drivers on a per-machine basis. The Windows image itself has no useful drivers on it, but it is a post-sysprep image. The machine will work fine in ATA compatability mode - it will boot, scan through the drivers, add them to the OEM PnP list, run sysprep and reboot. But when I turn on AHCI mode, the machine will simply reboot instead of starting Windows. I really need to avoid changing the Windows image itself - we have tons of hardware variations and need to keep this whole process as hardware indepndent as possible. How can I use sysprep or some other tool to force the machine to install the AHCI drivers even though it won't detect the hardware for it - so I can boot off of it?