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

Are your driver .inf files located in C:\OEMDriversToInstall?

Yes. I was able manually update it using Device Manager and pointing it to my OEMDriversToInstall folder so all driver files present.

Question: Do you know (if I recall correctly) on each boot Windows should go looking for drivers using DriverPath for Plug and Play devices that are still missing their drivers? Or maybe it just checks DriverStore - as in that case the driver not being installed would mean never staged into DriverStore. Ugh. confused.

ComputerGeek said:

Yes. I was able manually update it using Device Manager and pointing it to my OEMDriversToInstall folder so all driver files present.

Device Manager manual update has the option to search subfolders. You also used the option /SUBDIRS with the PNPUTIL command. Can you post the result of "DIR C:\OEMDriversToInstall" please? I have a suspicion that you are going to find folders in that directory, rather than actual .inf files.

ComputerGeek said:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\DevicePath value to %SystemRoot%\inf;C:\OEMDriversToInstall

Unless you're editing this path inside RegEdit, backslashes in a .reg file need to be escaped.
ie. "C:\\OEMDriversToInstall"

garlin said:

Unless you're editing this path inside RegEdit, backslashes in a .reg file need to be escaped.
ie. "C:\\OEMDriversToInstall"

Thanks for the tip. I was editing the path in RegEdit but good to know!

- - - Updated - - -

hsehestedt said:

EDIT: This is a major edit of my original post. The procedure that I provided came from my personal notes, but it was only hours after my original post that I realized that I derived those notes from an excellent tutorial by @Kari. That tutorial is far better than my notes and it includes lots of screenshots. I really don't want to take credit for the hard work of Kari!

I wrote my notes several years ago, and was so eager to respond that I merely overlooked this. Apologies for the confusion!

Here is the link to Kari's tutorial showing how to add drivers to your image:

DISM - Add or Remove Drivers on an Offline Image

NOTE: You can make this whole process REALLY easy by using a program I wrote for myself to automate all the tasks in Kari's tutorial. You won't need to run any of the commands as the program simply does all that for you. In fact, if you want to inject the drivers into multiple editions of Windows all in one shot, it will automate that for you as well. Just let me know if interested and I will show you how to get it.

Please be aware that this procedure updates ONE single edition of Windows in your image. If your master image has only one Windows edition, great. If you have multiple editions (Home, Pro, Education edition, etc.) and you want to inject the driver into all editions then you need to repeat the procedure for each edition. You don't have to mount / unmount the image each time. Just mount it once, then inject the drivers for each edition, then unmount the image.

IMPORTANT: Please be aware that the above procedure adds or removes drivers to the main Windows image. If you need drivers available during Windows installation, there is a separate procedure for that. If you need to know how to do this, I can provide that info to you as well. Be aware that my program can also automate that task for you

Thanks for all the info. I'm familiar with DISM. I've used it to add/remove drivers to offline .wim files. At issue in this case, I'm trying to replace Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) with another solution to deploy a "golden image" to target PCs of different make/models. MDT supports injecting needed out-of-box drivers specific to each target PC make/model.

I've been playing with Acronis Snap Deploy (SD). It's much simpler to support than MDT. Once set up, it shouldn't need someone beyond a standard geek background to continue to support it. But, it also has limitations i'm trying to work around.

• I can successfully use SD to transfer driver files to the target PC then use SD to invoke pnputil /add-driver to install the transferred drivers.
• I could not get modifying HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Devicepath to work. In part, even if just for my own education, was trying to figure out why.
• I am curious to hear about your add'l alternate solution.

But am going out of town tomorrow till mid Oct. Can follow-up then. Thank you.