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#1
Installing OEM drivers during deployment
Not sure if this best posted under Installations or Drivers...
I volunteer at a Community Center. I'm trying out an (inexpensive) Deployment tool to push a master image out to 20 PCs. All run Windows 10 Pro 21H2. There's an issue when the master image is missing the network driver the target needs so the target has a working ether connection after reboot. (Dell Optiplex 7480 is the target. Its ether driver isn't an in-box Windows 10 driver either)
I thought of two simple work-arounds: one works the other doesn’t. Trying to learn why the second approach doesn’t work. TIA for any info. In both cases, I create a folder C:\OEMDriversToInstall to contain OEM driver packages to be installed.
Case 1 – works
I invoke a batch file on target boot:
Code:PNPUTIL /ADD-DRIVER "C:\OEMDriversToInstall\*.INF" /SUBDIRS /INSTALL
Case 2 – doesn’t work
I modified DevicePath in registry as below – which I understand tells Windows the folders to search for driver packages to install. However, whether I reboot or invoke DeviceManager-> \Scan For Hardware Changes the OEM drivers aren’t installed. I've looked in the Device Manager logfile setupapi.dev.log and don’t see Windows making any attempt to look for or install the network driver after reboot or told to scan for new hardware. Am I using DevicePath correctly? Is pnputil the only option that will work?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath value to %SystemRoot%\inf;C:\OEMDriversToInstall