Redhatcc Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 What we have is several DVD's with raw extracted drivers on them, and here at work if a tech formats and reloads a machine instead of searching hours for drivers online they will pop in one of the dvd's and tell it to automatically search for drivers on the dvd and %99 of the time if the computer is 1year or more old it will find the drivers... but we have probally about 40gb's of extracted drivers and several dvds we have to go through to find sometime and i was wondering... Is there a way to make a folder on our server (Microsoft Server 2003) and tell the newly formatted computer to search that folder for drivers that are missing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
submix8c Posted February 11, 2009 Share Posted February 11, 2009 Yes, as long as the initial load/install has drivers for the NIC (and undoubtedly SATA) that connects to the server having the shared folder. Not much different than what you're doing; I do this (just fixing up old PC's). Bear in mind that any drivers "loaded" will still point to the DVD/CD/SHARE each time some kind of "repair" involves reloading them (the drivers) unless the INF causes everything to be copied to the PC. Also, you would (for expediency) want to segregate them by classification (type of device). You could perhaps also automate it. Look into the Unattended section for the INF requirements (you may have already done this with what you have).HTH Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redhatcc Posted February 11, 2009 Author Share Posted February 11, 2009 well i managed to get it where i could access the folder via the freshly formatted computer... but how would i get it to scan the folder for drivers via Device Manager? i tried to specify the location such as \\abcserver\test as the the folder but it could not access it. We dont set up any account on the computers that access the network here at work... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DigeratiPrime Posted February 12, 2009 Share Posted February 12, 2009 Maybe this is what you are looking for?HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redhatcc Posted February 15, 2009 Author Share Posted February 15, 2009 i'll have to pick back up on this monday... but so far i have been unsucessful. What i have done (if anyone else finds this useful) is that i have a external hdd with all the drivers on it or inside folder within it and i get the computer to search the ext. hdd for drivers... just though it would be nice to search for drivers via anywhere we plug into the network instead of running around going "Where the heck is my external hard drive gone!!" lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IcemanND Posted February 16, 2009 Share Posted February 16, 2009 Have you looked at tools like DriverForge? You point it to your drivers folder and it installs or updates all of the device drivers on your system using the drivers you pointed to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redhatcc Posted February 27, 2009 Author Share Posted February 27, 2009 i could def use this tool in the future but had no luck accessing a network that you have to log into (start>run>\\abcfolder\abc>enter username / password)im starting to get the drift that this isnt something you can do without making the folder somehow public to every computer that is connected? Since these computers are not configured on a network to access the folders on the server, is there a way to make a public folder anyone could access? (as in a customer walks in the store and plugs directly into a network cable and can see the folder) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IcemanND Posted February 27, 2009 Share Posted February 27, 2009 I can't say that I have ever tried to do such a thing. But you may be able to do it by either adding the everyone group or enabling or creating another guest account and giving that account permissions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redhatcc Posted February 28, 2009 Author Share Posted February 28, 2009 I can't say that I have ever tried to do such a thing. But you may be able to do it by either adding the everyone group or enabling or creating another guest account and giving that account permissions.That sparks a few ideas i will share with a fellow worker and see what we come up with.... we might can work around the permissions thing ^^btw thx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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