After going through this with a client the other day, i thought it might make a good post.

So – you have made up your Windows 7 SOE using SCCM OSD and its all working well on virtuals – and now it comes time to start adding support for all the various makes and models of desktop hardware around your organisation.

1. Decide which driver deployment method you are going to use.  More detail can be found here – http://hayesjupe.wordpress.com/sccm-osd-driver-best-practices/. Basically, if you have bucketloads of different makes/models in your organisation, then creating driver packages without importing into the database is probably better…. if you have a small number of drivers…. importing and auto-applying drivers is probably easier.

2. Kick off a build on the hardware device you want to add driver support for

3. If Windows PE reboots immediately without running your task sequence, your either missing a network driver or mass sotrage driver – as these are the two things that windows PE needs to do… grab data off the network and write it to the local disk, to check this

3a. Press F8 to open a command prompt (i am assuming this is enabled in your boot image)

3b. Type in IPconfig…. if you get something back… network is fine… if not, then you are missing a nic driver

3c. start up diskpart | list disk…. if the disk shows up, your driver is fine, if not, its not! 🙂

3d. Download appropriate driver, add to driver database, add to appropreiate boot wim, redistribute boot wim

4. Once the machine has built and has win 7 on it, open device manager and check for the yellow exclaimation marks

5. Download the appropriate drivers for each of devices

6 If you are having trouble working out which is the appropriate driver, go into the device properties and get the PNPID (or the hardware ID) – and use that within a google search – there will be plenty of infoi out there based on the PNP ID

7. Check that it is the correct driver by trying to install it on your test machine, if it is, put that driver aside.

8. Once you have got rid of all the yellow exclaimation marks, you may also want to check that the video driver (which may just be using startd VGA) is also updated

9. Now that you have all myour correct dirvers – import them into SCCM using your preffered method

10. Rebuild the machine and check that all the drivers apply correctly….

11. Done!