Integrate driver base for Corporate Deployment

[wwwmario]

Hi guys,

after spending lot of time reading you guides and posts on the msfn (really helpful); I'm starting to guess that most of you are actually creating unattended installs of WinXP

for your home computers or for a relatively small number of different systems for which you know what hardware is installed. (I'm really looking 4 someone that tells me "ya're wrong, dude!"

My concerns are especially related to device drivers; looks like Yonderboy has had my same kinda problems (see_post).

I'm preparing a network unattended distro-point for WinXP via bootdisk/RIS and I'm trying to cover the most of the ~300 systems the customer

I'm developing for has. (of course they're to many to get a whole picture of all the different hw components systems feature).

1)As Yonderboy writes, many driver packages come in a self-extracting compressed archive that once extracted shows a setup.exe plus some

or many non-ms cabs and some dirs containing plain .inf files.

As him, I'm not sure whether getting all the .inf, .cat, .sys and .dll, putting them inside $OEM$\$1\drivers\xxx_xxxx and fixing the OemPnPDriversPath is enough

or will result in some install errors (unfortunately I can't make a reality test in my lab cuz' I haven't such different hw...)

2)I don't think the silent install from whatever method (runonceex.inf,cmdlines.txt, .cmd, etc.); can be an option in this scenario

as I can't think of a way to call only the packages needed for devices that are present in the systems.

It's true that all latest packages feature a device detector, but how it will behave in a silent install if it doesn't find a device is still a "?".

3)I noticed the following post see_post but I think I lack some knowledge on how to modify win's txtsetup.sif to include all I need.

Shrinking the distro-point size it's not important (pheeew); so at least I can allow myself to be not so sleek in including data.

Anyone has adv?!

Thanks,

/Mario