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Vista not picking up drivers using WDS

Firstly, thanks in advance for any help on this, its really annoying me.

We are using WDS to perform unattended installations of Windows Vista on a number of Dell Optiplex 360's.

The PC images fine, but when it finishes the PC is missing a couple of drivers. I have added the drivers to the drivers folder on the WDS. We also use the same server to deploy Windows 7 and it works fine (installs all drivers,etc) so it would seem this is setup correctly. Its only when Vista is deployed that the drivers are missing. It seems like it is not going to the drivers folder.

I have manually installed the drivers after the install to ensure they are the correct drivers and they are. I have also downloaded the CAB file with all Vista drivers for the Optiplex 360 and added that to the drivers folder on the WDS.

The drivers are for 32bit Vista and i am installing 32bit Vista. Dont know where to go next with this, any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks
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LesterClayton
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Hello :)

Adding those drivers to WDS does not help.  Those drivers are there so you can inject them into WIM files - such as the boot.wim file so that the drivers are loaded when the WinPE image loads.  You'd generally not do anything else other than Network drivers and Disk drivers here - so that the WinPE environment can talk to the WDS server, and also that it can load up the Disk on the machine you've booted into WinPE.

All is not lost however - what you will need to do is make a customized automatic build script using WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit), and add the component called "Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsNonWinPE" to the offlineServicing node.  You then configure this section to search for drivers from a root path.

During the unattended installation, the computer will connect to the specified share using the credentials you've provided, and then search through the path for all drivers which match hardware ID's on your computer.  You literally chuck all the drivers in subfolders, and Windows will detect which ones to use.  The drivers do however have to be in the INF format - any drivers which require a setup won't work - you will have to extract the INF files.  

You can also use 3rd party software to extract drivers from a built machine and make them available in INF format - for example, the one I use which is http://www.grandutils.com/DriverExtractor/

Here is an example section which is in my unattend.xml file

        <component name="Microsoft-Windows-PnpCustomizationsNonWinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
            <DriverPaths>
                <PathAndCredentials wcm:action="add" wcm:keyValue="1">
                    <Credentials>
                        <Domain>DOMAIN</Domain>
                        <Password>Password</Password>
                        <Username>Username</Username>
                    </Credentials>
                    <Path>\\server.domain\Apps\Source\Drivers\inf</Path>
                </PathAndCredentials>
            </DriverPaths>
        </component>

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NOTE: This is a sample only, and from Windows 7, but the Vista ones should be very similar.
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