I have my WDS server all set up, but the Optiplex 790’s that we have unfortunately do not have NIC drivers with the default catalogues in the Windows 7 install CD.
When I was creating my deployment boot images, I based them off a clean Windows 7 SP1 install. This caused problems when I was either capturing my ‘sysprepped’ machine, or deploying the image to a new machine. Basically both the capture and deployment images need to have the drivers loaded in. Mind you, this is NOT putting drivers into the OS, this is adding drivers to the WIM images so that the PXE boot image will be able to properly deploy the image from the WDS server.
Here’s my application:
1) Install the WAIK from Microsoft on your WDS server or something that has connections to the WIM repo.
1.5) Just to be safe, DISABLE the image that you are mounting from the WDS server (right click, disable)
2) Open the ‘Deployment Tools Command Prompt’
3) Mkdir a folder where there is enough free space to mount your WIM, ergo
Mkdir c:\mnt
4) Mount your WIM that you want to add drivers to with the DISM command,
dism /Mount-WIM /WimFile:fullpathtoyourWIM /index:1 /MountDir:c:\mnt
5) With the drivers extracted to a folder, use the DISM command to inject the drivers to the mounted image,
dism /image:c:\mnt /add-driver /driver:”c:\DellDrivers”
6) Once they are loaded, unmount the image and commit the changes with DISM, {this step can take .. a WHILE}
dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:c:\mnt /commit
7) Then re-enable the image in the WDS and cheer.
*edit* so up there i just supplied the index for the WIM that I happened to be editing. Make sure your injecting to the right Index (read, windows version) for the WIM. To get the index of the WIM to this:
dism /Get-WimInfo /WimFile:fullpathtowimfile
You can add the optional ‘/index:x’ at the end to see the info for a specific index thats in there.