For my Windows Vista deployment at work, I’ve been using Windows Deployment Services on Server 2003. Overall it has been going pretty well. The server allows for entire disk images to be uploaded and then sent back down to the clients. Once the initial setup is done, it makes the work go pretty fast. I did however run into an issue last week. I had created an image of one of our developer’s machines that I wanted to use in the future. They have so many programs it takes a few hours to setup. The problem I ran into is that they use Adaptec SCSI controllers which is not supported by the default Win PE environment.
I found a method of injecting a driver into the image so that Win PE could see the drives (this could also be done for NIC, video, or pretty much anything else). First I had to install the Windows Automated Installion Kit (WAIK) in order to get access to the imagex.exe program. This allows you to mount the .wim image file and manipulate the files inside. The command is
imagex /mountrw c:path_to_imageimagename.wim X c:tempmount
where X = the image number you want to manipulate in your .wim (you can store more than one image in a .wim). The “c:tempmount” is the directory will the files will be mounted, so make sure that is already created. I also recommend copying the image locally as well.
Next I need to inject the driver. The command is
peimg.exe /inf:c:drivers*.inf /image=c:tempmount
where c:drivers is where your (hopefully Vista compliant) drivers are located. You can point directly to a specific .inf or if you use the *.inf wildcard it will inject all of what you have in that folder. You will get a successful/unsuccessful message. So if it doesn’t work check for what you did wrong. So now I need to unmount the image using
imagex /unmount /commit c:tempmount
The /commit one is pretty important otherwise any changes made will not be saved to the .wim. I then copied my updated .wim to the WDS server and proceeded to PXE boot the image… only to find that it still didn’t detect the SCSI controller. I found out that simply overwriting the image doesn’t update WDS. I still needed to go into the WDS console, right click the image and choose “Replace Image” and then choose my new image. Voila! Worked like a charm. Now I need to figure out any other drivers I need to add.
Next step: Get the Windows SIM answer file to work.
