Boot Critical and Mass Storage Drivers

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The following contribution from Brett Flegg outlines the steps for working with boot critical and mass storage drivers in ConfigMgr 07 Operating System Deployment.

First, you will need to determine if the default boot image contains a compatible driver for your RAID controller.  The easiest way to do this is enable the boot image’s debug shell, boot to Windows PE (using boot media or PXE) and use F8 when the splash screen comes up to open a command shell.  You can then check what drives you can access.  If you cannot see the hard drive, you will need to find a Vista-compatible version of the driver and import it into the driver catalog.  Once it is imported you can add it to the boot image, boot to Windows PE again, and verify you can access the hard drive.

Next, you will need to figure out what drivers you need for the operating system that you are deploying.  The steps you take depend on the version of the operating system you are deploying:

  • If you are deploying Vista, you will just need to add the driver that you imported to a driver package and assign it to a DP that the client can access.  The Auto Apply Driver step will automatically determine applicability and install the driver at deployment time.
  • For Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Windows XP you will need to take some additional steps since the Auto Apply Driver action does not automatically install boot critical drivers on these operating systems. 
  1. First, you will need to import the correct version of the driver using the txtsetup.oem file and add it to a driver package.
  2. Next, you will need to add an Apply Driver Package step right before your Auto Apply Drivers step in your task sequence and select the “Select the mass storage driver within the package that needs to be installed before setup on pre-Vista operating systems” option.  You can then use this task sequence to deploy the image. (Note that if you have several types of machines in your environment you can use task sequence conditions on the Apply Driver Package step so that only the correct version of the driver is installed).

For more information, see the “How to Manage the Driver Catalog” section in the product documentation.

Contributed by Brett Flegg