FT Job - New Mass Storage Drivers

For starters, this post is for Windows XP images, I focus on Windows Imaging (WIM) format, so feel free to modify for ghost images (and if you do, please link back so that everyone can follow along).

So, as part of my Full Time job, I am tasked with setting up and deploying new PC models as part of our single standard image (for 32 bit desktop and laptop models) when we decide that we are going to use a new piece of hardware.

One of the painful points in doing this has always been getting new Mass Storage Drivers (for those that use imaging technologies, it's the painful 7B error at the end after dumping the image onto the new hard drive).

This error of course stems itself from the fact that there is not a standard SATA chipset (and for Vista it's not needed) that all mother board manufacturers use.

Don't sweat it, this is a quick run down of what I am planning on implementing for my company, that will make the work effort as light as possible for anyone that has to update these going forward. I plan to follow this post up with several posts on the engineering of the actual plan and any tweaks along the way. Call this my design document...

We currently are using the Micrsoft Deployment Toolkit and a single WIM image for deploying all of our hardware models for our end users. In doing this, each time we receive a new hardware model with a new Mass Storage option, we have to break open the WIM, add the driver.sys, the driver.inf, update the system registry with the critical device database entries and then update the services to reflect the proper information for the new drivers.

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Going forward, I will be creating a MassStorage.WIM file that will contain, simply, the driver.sys, the driver.inf and the updated c:\windows\system32\config\system files. I will then update the Task List with a task, after Installing the Operating System, Install the Mass Storage WIM file by using the command "imagex /apply MassStorage.wim c:\". The index will of course be the version of the MassStorage.WIM necessary to apply the latest set of files.

Have a great day.