Old Dog, New Tricks
Well, I’m not actually that old, but I did learn a new trick today. I’ve been fighting the drivers is an OSD XP deployment task sequence for an HP dc5800. The drivers just wouldn’t load. The TS copied them down to the system properly, the DriverPaths registry value was updated properly, but the drivers wouldn’t load. After the TS completed, I could go into device manager and point the unknown devices to the folders on the C drive (C:\Drivers) and the drivers would load without any issue, they just weren’t getting automatically installed during mini-setup.
Checking the setupapi.log didn’t reveal anything except that the OS tried to find drivers for the devices but just didn’t load the ones in C:\Drivers. I tried everything that I could think of including deleting all the drivers and re-adding them to ConfigMgr, rebuilding the image, using different drivers, creating new TSes, and still nothing. I’ve implemented OSD in production environments more than a handful of times and in test environments at least as many times but had not seen this at all before: this had me really scratching my head. The problem did not appear to be with ConfigMgr though as it was definitely copying the drivers to destination system; XP mini-setup just refused to reference them, or see them, or I have no idea.
A quick web search turned up this older post: SCCM 2007 OSD Drivers Show as New Hardware Found when you Login by Brian Tucker. It was worth a shot as I was at a complete loss. Basically, I added a new command-line task near the end of the TS that runs the following command: rundll32.exe Syssetup.dll,UpdatePnpDeviceDrivers. This command reruns the PNP device setup and, from what I’ve read, is also executed during XP mini-setup.
This did fix the issue, but I still don’t really know what’s causing it. I don’t know of anything different in the image or the process as a whole. I haven’t done XP using OSD on a dc5800 before so this is the only thing I can think of that is different; I’ve done Vista on a dc5800 without any issues though. I still think ConfigMgr rocks!