I've got a problem that is starting to frustrate me. I'm installing XP Pro SP2 slipstreamed fully unattended on a Dell Optiplex GX280. Everything works great except when it comes to installing the drivers for the network and video card. The installation does not recognize the devices even with the inf files declared in oempnpdriverspath. Device manager shows them classified as 'Other Devices' after the install completes. I have the inf, sys and cat files in the root of the driver folders. The full path to those folders are...

\PRO2\$OEM$\$1\Drivers\000_netbroad for example.

Now I am using CDShell with BCDW and showgif module to boot into PE to run winnt32 file to initiate install. I don't know if doing it this way causes problems installing the drivers. Here is a relevant snippet from my winnt.sif file:

[unattended]

UnattendMode=FullUnattended

OemSkipEula=Yes

OemPreinstall=Yes

OemFilesPath=\PRO2\$OEM$

TargetPath=\WINDOWS

FileSystem=LeaveAlone

Repartition=no

WaitForReboot=no

UnattendSwitch=Yes

DUDisable=Yes

DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore

OemPnPDriversPath=drivers\000_chipset;drivers\001_net3com;drivers\002_netintel1;drivers\003_netintel2;drivers\004_netbroad;drivers\005_ati;drivers\006_nvidia

The devices specifically in question are the Broadcom NetXtreme NIC and the ATI Radeon X300. And I am referring to just the drivers--no control panels or other diagnostic/tweaking software.

Now, can anyone tell my why the drivers are not getting installed? Also, let me put this question out there. Will Windows become confused and not install a driver when it has two versions to pick from? i.e. from oempnpdriverspath and driver.cab

This shouldn't be OemFilesPath="..\$OEM$" instead ?

I created a multiboot the other day, following the method described here and that's what i put in my winnt.sif.

@Lucius

The current path I use now seems to work. In fact I know it works because my cmdlines.txt file gets processed with all the stuff that is listed in it.

Surely it should be :

OemPnPDriversPath="xxxxxxxxx;xxxxxxxxx"

There should be quote marks around the paths

Fury

Are quotes necessary? The ref file that came with the deployment pack does not indicate so. Also, I've seen many winnt.sif file examples that do not use quotes around the paths.

I had similar problems with SP2 which were due to SP2 including slightly later versions of the driver than those available from the web. It might be worth comparing the versions of your drivers against those in the .cab.

This is strange, but the problem is fixed. It seems as though that initially XP had a problem with my display device. It was detecting the hardware and loading the driver but indicating the device was not working properly. I also noticed that the video card was the first device in the chain of devices detected that XP would attempt to detect and load. In the Dell's BIOS, I changed the video from Onboard to Auto and suddenly all my drivers were installing unattended. I can only guess that XP was originally hicupping on the display device and broke the driver install process for the other devices.