We recently received new hardware a few months shy of our Windows 7 upgrade from Windows XP SP3. This new hardware is different enough that our existing WinPE/BartPE boot CD's wouldn't work which required us to create new CD's with updated drivers. (This is not a big deal and isn't the source of our problem.)

The problem though is this:

Even though we can image (ghost) the new machines with our Windows XP SP3 image, the image itself still needs to be updated with the drivers. As it stands, after imaging, Windows attempts to boot up and bluescreens. Presumably this happens because it lacks the storage controller drivers.

How can I manually update drivers of an already sysprepped image (contained within a .gho file)?

Can I drop the INF's and SYS files in some folder that Windows will recognize & pull drivers from? (If so, what goes where?)

Is there a sysprep INI, or other configuration, file I can update with the hardware ID's? (If so, what's the file name & where is it?)

What recourse do I have?

Edited January 20, 201115 yr by Phylum

I've seen this site http://www.deployvista.com/Blog/tabid/70/EntryID/18/Default.aspx which gave me hope and I tried my hand at it this morning with no success. Its possible I made a mistake or missed some mundane, but crucial, detail vital to success, but without knowing where I went wrong, its hard for me to correct my process.

Despite my failure I had another engineer, one with far more experience than I, take a look at the site and his initial response was that it might be for a RIS install, which is slightly different than what we're doing.

Unless someone has better suggestions, I only see 3 options at this point:

1. Reverse-engineer the way sysprep currently does it. Look for a device ID of a driver we have and see what exactly the sysprep process does to it. (Although, what worries me is that if it was easy, there wouldn't be a convoluted way in sysprep to manuall add mass storage drivers.)
   
2. Stand up another vanilla Win XP machine, add the drivers to it then run 'sysprep -factory' & see if I can update our existing image with the files sysprep produces.
   
3. Start from scratch.
   

Again, many thanks for any advice, or assistance.