I'm preparing a fat image for multiple system types. Applications and updates are installed & configured. I've copied the various machine specific drivers to
- C:\Windows\Drivers\<MODEL>.
From there I added the driver locations to the registry using this command
- reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" /v DevicePath /d "C:\Windows\Drivers" /t reg_sz /f
I run sysprep, the machine restarts, begins its configuration process, detects the hardware (and presumably loads the appropriate drivers), then says 'Setup will continue after your system restarts' - or something like that - and from there, the machine
is stuck in an endless reboot loop. At first I thought it was a bad driver, but after eliminating drivers in chunks then getting down to just one driver (audio or video for instance), I knew something else was wrong.
If I follow the same system build process but exclude the driver copy portion, and also the registry entry above, and then run sysprep, everything is fine.
I assume my adding of the registry entry is what's causing things to break.
- By doing that, am I forcing Windows to *only* look in one location versus the locations it would normally look for drivers?
- Is there a typo?
Should I add other locations to that list like
- C:\Windows\inf
- C:\Windows\System32\drivers
- C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore
- C:\Windows\System32\DRVSTORE
For what its worth, the machines are all Dell (Optiplex 755, 760 and 780; Latitude E4300, E6400, D630) and I believe they all use an Intel Chipset and have SATA drives.
Update: I needed to include "%SystemRoot%\inf" as part of the device path
reg add "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion" /v DevicePath /d "%SystemRoot%\inf;C:\Windows\Drivers;" /t
reg_expand_sz /f
