“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.”
~Nathaniel Borenstein
Historically, we have maintained two separate
WIM images on our
Windows Deployment Services server. These images have been tied to two different brands of PC, partly due to our automatic naming script but also due to the fact that both brands needed a different set of drivers.
With the introduction of a new batch of PCs (the same brand as we have previously been using, if you were wondering if they were a third brand,) we decided to experiment with creating a single, universal, image.
This has worked very well, with the exception of needing to manually rename the minority of PCs that are of the odd brand. In order to achieve the desired result we followed our usual process of creating a reference machine,
sysprepping it and capturing the image.
Instead of uploading the image directly to our WDS server, it got mounted using
imagex and the following command was run to add a directory filled to the brim with every driver we use on-site:
Dism /Image:C:\mount /Add-Driver /Driver:c:\drivers /Recurse /ForceUnsigned
This assumes the image was mounted to C:\mount\ and the drivers were stored in C:\drivers\Now any machine we deploy the image to gets it's full suite of drivers, and the work involved in maintaing our deployment images has been halved.
Ingredients: