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Add Non-PnP Driver to offline WinPE 2.x image


wschulze

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Hello,

I am trying to add a non-PnP driver to an offline WinPE 2.x image.

The driver works OK when I add it manually (mount WinPE 2.x image, copy sys file, load WinPE registry hive, add driver Registry entries, unmount WinPE 2.x image).

Looking for a more comfortable way, I tried adding the driver via "peimg /inf", which appeared to work - peimg reported no error, and the driver files were copied to the WinPE 2.x image. However, the driver was not loaded when booting the WinPE 2.x image.

Does anybody know if it is possible to add Non-PnP drivers via "peimg /inf" to a WinPE 2.x image?

If not, is there any other comfortable way of adding Non-PnP drivers to an offline WinPE 2.x image?

Thanks for any information.

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We have found that some drivers have .inf files that include sections for multiple OS versions. These drivers have problems loading until you remove / comment out the sections that do not apply. This is particularly true for x64 drivers. We have better luck once the x86 sections are removed from the files. I don't know if the x86 version of WinPE has the same issue, we are currently concentrating on the x64 version first.

However we are finding that driver loading is more luck than anything at the moment. There is a driver loading preference and we find that sometimes WinPE will load its own driver if it thinks it is better and ignore the driver you have added to the image. This is particularly the case if the WinPE native driver is newer, or just gets loaded first, or if it thinks it is a better PnPID match. We have found that Drvload, used once the WinPE OS is running, can force a new driver to be loaded. We also have found issues with Virtual Bus device drivers for NIC cards.

We are still figuring out the best set of drivers for our images and seeing which work and which don't. Unfortunately HP, who's servers we mainly use, do not seem to actually test the drivers they put out in the Smart Start scripting toolkit for WinPE 2.1

I would like to know more on your method of inserting drivers manually and updating the registry settings in PE.

Thanks.

Hello,

I am trying to add a non-PnP driver to an offline WinPE 2.x image.

The driver works OK when I add it manually (mount WinPE 2.x image, copy sys file, load WinPE registry hive, add driver Registry entries, unmount WinPE 2.x image).

Looking for a more comfortable way, I tried adding the driver via "peimg /inf", which appeared to work - peimg reported no error, and the driver files were copied to the WinPE 2.x image. However, the driver was not loaded when booting the WinPE 2.x image.

Does anybody know if it is possible to add Non-PnP drivers via "peimg /inf" to a WinPE 2.x image?

If not, is there any other comfortable way of adding Non-PnP drivers to an offline WinPE 2.x image?

Thanks for any information.

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Make sure you're adding VISTA drivers if possible since PE 2.x is a Vista kernel. I found a device with a NIC that wasn't natively supported so I downloaded drivers from Dell, but made the mistake of getting the XP drivers. After I downloaded and integrated the Vista version, it worked fine.

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@WreX:

Thanks for the hint. I have verified that the driver works OK with WinPE 2.x by mounting the WinPE 2.x Registry hive on the technician machine, and making the driver entries manually. So, the driver is the correct one. Of course, I may have screwed up the INF file ...

@leen2:

Thanks for your detailed information.

The manual method I use is basically described in this post:

http://www.msfn.org/board/How-to-edit-WinP...ne-t112872.html

The INF file is not decorated for multiple target platforms, and the driver has no associated hardware - you may think of it as something like a RAM disk driver. Also, this driver does not replace any existing WinPE 2.x in-box driver.

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