Certain Dell models are not enjoying my Universal image
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Now to moving forward: How do you create your reference image (one for all)? Are you doing that through MDT? If so lets dig into that a bit more.
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@george1421 I am building my reference image on a VM and then the unattend.xml in Windows System Image Manager.
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@mlnancejr8808 You are hand editing the unattend.xml file? Eeek…
How are you injecting the drivers? Are you installing every driver for every hardware into that vm or are you injecting the drivers through some other method?
Just for full disclosure I have one image for 14 Dell computers
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I am using driverpacks. Placing them in C:\Windows\inf\Drivers
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@mlnancejr8808 said:
I am using driverpacks. Placing them in C:\Windows\inf\Drivers
Again are you installing all drivers for all models? (not being difficult, the path forward is different based on how you answer)
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@george1421 No I am not installing all drivers for all models.
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@mlnancejr8808 How then are you deploying to a 755, 380 and 390 system (assuming they would install correctly)?
I’m going to bump this to chat since we can get faster turn around. Look for the red mark next to the balloon comment near your icon at the top of the browser window.
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@george1421 This didn’t work.
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OK from the chat session, the OP is downloading the drivers from driverpacks.net and stuffing them into the c:\windows\inf\drivers folder. My bet is that he is missing or have a driver that is close to what he needs but it is crashing.
My recommendation would be to download the driver packs from the Dell using the link I provided earlier.
In addition I can give you some hints on how to load these drivers how we do it.
I have a task sequence in MDT that does this to the reference image on the VM.
REM Create directory to load drivers if NOT EXIST "C:\Drivers" mkdir "C:\Drivers" REG ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" /v DevicePath /t REG_SZ /d "C:\Drivers;%SystemRoot%\inf;" /fFirst I create a directory to hold the drivers and then I update the registry to tell the computer to look in the C:\Drivers folder first before looking in the C:\Windows\inf folder. This will allow windows to find the vendor specific drivers first before using the windows built in drivers.
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@george1421 What is MDT that you are referring to?
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Now I can tell you in concept what I do. I go to the dell site and download the cab files for each model I want to support. Those cab files contains all of the drivers for that specific model. I use 7Zip and extract the driver files from the cab file. Through the magic of a bash shell script I push the contents of that exact hardwares expanded cab file to the target computer post image deployment. When the sysprepp’d image boots for the first time it finds all of its drivers in the c:\drivers folder.
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@mlnancejr8808 said:
@george1421 What is MDT that you are referring to?
Microsoft Deployment Tools. It is a free tool from MS used to build reference images. Using the lite touch method I build a new reference image every quarter. I just launch the MDT deployment and come back a few hours later with a reference image ready to sysprep.
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@mlnancejr8808 To do the C:\Drivers folder and update the registry you don’t need MDT. You can do this manually or via a cmd file when you build your reference image in Audit mode. I love MDT because our reference image is exactly the same every time we create it.
If you were going the MDT route to build your reference image I would also say to include the WinPE drivers right in the MDT reference image.
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@george1421 The only Drivers I am seeing for the Op755 is the WinPE Cab…will that work?
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@mlnancejr8808 said:
@george1421 The only Drivers I am seeing for the Op755 is the WinPE Cab…will that work?
Yeah, that’s pretty old. Its not certified for Win7 only XP. With that said, I would bet the windows built in drivers will work for that. Or just load the 780 drivers for Win7. Since this until is about 10 years old, all you can do is wing it.
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@george1421 HAHAHAH! Thats awesome cause I have about 350 units Im gonna have to wing it on!
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@mlnancejr8808 Make one work, then all will work.
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@george1421 very true, very true. Thank you for all the help! Gonna dig my heals in on this.
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@george1421 Does HP have somewhere to get the CAB files as well? We unfortunately are bit of a mixed environment. I have HP 6200s and 6300s that the image DOES work on but we have some older machines, I havent tested yet that I wanna be prepared for.
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@mlnancejr8808 You can extract the files from the exe’s with the /a command switch if I’m not mistaken.
