How To Inject Text-Mode Drivers into a Lite-Touch Windows XP Installation
I'm sure someone else has run into this problem: while using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (formerly known as Business Deployment Desktop) to deploy Windows XP, everything seems to be working just fine until Windows PE finishes it's portion of the setup wherein it copies the Windows XP setup files to your hard drive; then when the XP text-mode setup begins, it fails to recognize the drive. This most commonly occurs on systems with SATA drives or a RAID configuration. The solution is to load the text-mode drivers for the device as you would during an individual install of the operating system. You might be thrown off by the fact that the text-mode setup started by the Deployment Toolkit never prompts for additional drivers. How do you get around this? Integrate the drivers directly into your operating system source using a tool called nLite.
Adding Drivers to a BDD LiteTouch Image
Since Vista's release Microsoft has provided a variety of tools for deploying their operating systems. One such tool is Business Deployment Desktop which Microsoft describes as "the best-practice set of comprehensive guidance and tools from Microsoft to optimally deploy Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system." Though BDD certainly makes OS and application deployment to a variety of hardware platforms simpler than ghosting, eventually you'll run into a problem: some critical hardware may not be natively supported by WinPE, the preinstallation environment used to load the OS onto a new system. This article will explain how to inject LAN drivers into WinPE, allowing you to deploy installations to a larger variety of hardware.
