Unattended Upgrade - Urgent Help Needed!

[TomDavidson]

We've got three weeks to push out an XP SP2 upgrade to a thousand Win2000 machines (don't ask), and I've discovered to my dismay that at least two of our models are using network cards with drivers too new to be included in the XP driver.cab.

Ergo, when the machines get the XP upgrade push (which otherwise runs fine), they come back up without networking. This makes it rather difficult to push out new drivers to them, as you might imagine, and means we may have to touch every single machine of this model with an admin. *shudder*

Problems:

1) I can't use SMS to add something to RunOnce with elevated permissions, because the XP upgrade will not run -- period -- if it detects something in RunOnce.

2) I can't just add the drivers to $OEM$, because NTUpgrade=Yes cannot be used with OEMPreinstall=Yes in the answer file. And if OEMPreinstall=No, the $OEM$ folder is not created on the local machine.

3) I can't just add my own .cab, as far as I can tell, by modifying drvindex.inf and txtsetup.sif, because this requires a fresh install (see #2).

4) I don't know if I can just add the drivers to driver.cab or sp2.cab.

5) Our users do not all have admin rights to their machines, meaning we can't count on them to run a program on login; this has to happen during the install.

6) We can't ghost all these machines; we need to preserve some user settings and custom programs, which is why my boss is requiring an upgrade.

Given all this, is there ANY solution? How do I get an upgrade installation to pick up on new drivers? Is this something that the Dynamic Update /duprepare procedure (which I don't really understand all that well) can handle?

[prathapml]

1. Use nLite (available and user-supported right here, on msfn forum) to merge the driver CABs. So driver.cab and SP2.cab will become one. Its better that this step be done, simply for the sake of simplifying later editing.

2. During the same time, I think nLite also allows you to integrate drivers into the I386 source (it will do all the required txtsetup.sif and drvindex editing by itself). I think this is what you want - to have the drivers as part of the original set of files in windows install (no need for $OEM$ tree).

If nLite does not do the type of driver-integration that YOU want, you can manually do the driver integration yourself.

Lastly, doing the above 2 steps and then upgrading, will work just fine. (just ensure that there are no *OTHER* mess-ups).

Do post back with your results.