Adding Drivers

Windows PE contains a comprehensive database of common drivers to enable your PC to start without any manual driver loading. However, some RAID controllers and recent network controllers may not be included in the standard environment. In this case you need to add your drivers to the Rescue Environment to enable these devices.

When the Windows PE component is installed the following directory structure is created on drive C.

and

You need to add the relevant driver files (.inf and .sys) to new directories beneath 'Disk' or 'Network'. It doesn't matter what you call the new directories, all sub directories will be enumerated for relevant driver files.

Example:  Adding a Network driver

In the this example we'll add drivers for an Intel 82566DC Ethernet LAN controller. This controller is not natively supported by Windows PE 2.0.

1. Locate Vista 32 bit drivers for the controller on the Intel web site.
    

2. Download the driver installer program 'ProVista32.exe'
    

3. The installer contains the required drivers but we don't want to execute it we just want to extract the driver files for our Windows PE build.  
   
   From a command prompt type the following:
   
   CD <download directory>
   ProVista32 /s /e /f "c:\boot\macrium\drivers\network"
   
   Note: In Vista you must execute the command prompt with elevated privileges.
   
   This will extract all the relevant driver files to the Windows PE driver directory. To speed up the boot process you can remove directories that contain drivers for devices that aren't connected to your PC.
    

4. That's it! The next time you boot your PC into the recovery environment the correct drivers will be loaded and if you burn a new Rescue CD this will also contain the required drivers.

If your drivers are available as zip file(s) then simply unzip these beneath the relevant sub-directory.