Quick tips: Adding driver packs to WDS

Windows giving a BSOD when trying to PXE boot? Windows setup crashing when trying to install over the network? Sounds like you need to get the latest drivers on your boot image! Here’s how.

Step 1:

Grab the proper driver package from the manufacturer (in my case it was lenovo). Some companies, like Lenovo, roll up all of their drivers for a machine into a nice easy to download package file, which I recommend over trying to collect the drivers one by one (Dell does this as well).

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Step 2:

Extract the downloaded drivers to a folder you’ll remember

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Step 3:

Copy the newly extracted driver files to the WDS deployment server

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Step 4:

On the windows deployment server, pull up the WDS control center, expand your current server, right-click on ‘Drivers’, and then select ‘Add driver package…’

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Step 5:

Select the folder you copied to the WDS server earlier, the one containing the downloaded/extracted drivers

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Step 6:

I usually just select all available drivers and add them, but if you want to only select individual drivers you can do that during the add drivers wizard, seen below

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Step 7:

If you have an existing driver group, select it here. If you don’t have one yet, create a new driver group

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Step 8:

After completing the add driver packages wizard, select ‘boot images’ and then right-click on your current boot image and select ‘add driver packages’ from the dropdown

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Step 9:

Accept defaults until you reach the ‘search for packages’ page, click ‘search for packages’ and then finish the wizard.

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Finish:

After the add driver packages to boot image wizard completes, your ready to start installing your updated boot image on new machines BSOD free!


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