MDT 2008 and SMS 2003 – Automatically integrating Mass Storage Drivers support into your Windows PE source for SMS 2003 OSD
Although MDT will integrate both network and mass storage drivers for your Lab environment, it does not automatically integrated mass storage drivers for your SMS 2003 OSD Deployment Point/WinPE Boot Source. So when you import that boot source into SMS 2003 OSD, you will not have mass storage support, unless you add it prior to the import.
So looking at your Lab deployment point, you can see it will nicely integrate mass storage drivers for you:
However, if you look at your SMS 2003 deployment point in the workbench, you will not see that option available to you:
So how do we address that? You could manually integrate mass storage support into your PE source, using the method described here. However, the downside is that every time you do an “update” to the deployment point, it will rebuild that boot source and you will lose your mass storage integration that you manually added. Which is fine as long as you remember that before you import the new updated WinPE source into SMS 2003.
Taking advantaged of the “Extrafiles” feature in MDT, we can do a few customizations to ensure that when we build or update our deployment point in the workbench, that our boot source always contains the mass storage support we want.
First, we will want to create a folder to house the files, i typically just name it “Extrafiles” and put it in the Distribution folder.
You will want to build out the structure i have pictured below:
For the sake of it, i would recommend you throw trace32.exe in the \system32 folder so that you can view log files in a friendly view from within WinPE, you can also add anything else you might want to access from within WinPE.
I will use the Intel mass storage driver as an example below since that is what we use and it’s very common for many vendors to require this driver.
So in the \INF folder we will want to put the following files:
In the \DRIVERS folder you will want to put the other files from the driver package:
in \I386 you will want to put your modified txtsetup.sif that contains the necessary information for the Intel mass storage controllers, or whatever controller you are adding support for. If you are using the Intel one, make sure you have add the appropriate lines as per the document linked again here.
Now what we have our necessary folder structure, we will want to make sure we add the extrafiles directory to our SMS 2003 deployment point in the workbench:
Now when you use “update” on the deployment point, the necessary files required for mass storage support will be copied into your WinPE boot source every time.
One less thing to take care of manually :)
I hope this helps, please let me know if you have any questions.
-Chris