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Tony Blunt
Asked: 2012-06-20 09:23:42 +0800 CST

Adding Drivers To MDT 2012 Deployment Share

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Whilst I have experience of WDS/RIS, I am new to using MDT so I have a question regarding drivers. Our company has various different desktop hardware all over the place and I need to roll out Windows 7 to all machines. So far I have created my deployment share and used a task sequence to create my base reference image, using a VM. So far I have not added any Out-of-Box drivers. I have then added the reference WIM image into 'Operating Systems'

Now I have the task of rolling this out to the various types of hardware. My questions are:

1.Is it simply a case of adding in the required drivers into the 'Out-of-box Drivers' folder? 2.Do I need to update the deployment share after adding in the drivers? If so, do I need to refresh the boot image in WDS after doing so? 3.Can I simply dump all the drivers for all the different types of hardware in this folder, and the LiteTouch deployment will figure out what's needed during deployment?

Thanks in advance. Sorry if these are simple questions!

windows-server-2008 deployment wds mdt-2010

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The answer to 1 and 3 is "yes, but..." You may want to organize your drivers according to whether you need to use them in the boot (PE) images or the install images. Separating the drivers by model of computer can make it easier to replace the correct drivers when new versions are released. Updating the deployment share depends on where the drivers are going to be used.

    The answer to number 2 is, If you are adding drivers to the boot image, then yes, update the share and regenerate the boot images (using selection profiles for the boot image drivers is advised), then, yes you will have to replace the boot images in WDS to use these new boot images.

    For the OS deployment, MDT uses PnP calls to install the correct drivers. However,there is a task named 'Inject drivers' where you can specify which driver selection groups get installed. If you don't have many different models, you can just leave it at 'Everything', but as time you get many models or different operating systems, the selection profiles are very handy for keeping it all straight.

    For the boot images and USB or DVD installations this keeps the size of media smaller since you are only using the drivers you need instead of all of them. Johan Arwidmark has a great article on the 3 methods of driver management in MDT that should help you to decide the proper course for your situation.

    Hope this helps,

    (signature for disclosure purposes)

    David

    Windows Outreach Team - IT Pro

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