Deployment and Imaging Group

While importing drivers in to Deployment solution you might have seen failures but wondering the reason for failure, These drivers been used by DeployAnywhere while Deploy image operation or Scripted Windows installation task ; Driver manager which is a utility Deployment solution uses for driver addition , checks the basic structure of the driver and does some checks mentioned below while importing to the Driver database.

I have listed here some points to determine whether or not the driver can be used with Driver Management or with DeployAnywhere:

• Source Driver folder does not contain a Driver INF file ,This is a setup information file and windows uses this for installation on the driver.   
• A driver which comes with MSI / Setup, and the driver has to be installed using the driver manufacturer’s own installer, you wouldn’t be able to use that driver with DA.  This limitation has been seen with numerous video card drivers and with some Broadcom network drivers.
• If you cannot extract the driver and install it manually through the device manager, DA also won’t be able to use it.  This doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that if you can install via the device manager that it will always be compatible with DeployAnywhere or Driver Management.
• If the driver you’ve extracted does not contain all files mentioned in the driver INF, it will not work with DeployAnywhere or Driver Management. For example, if your extracted driver files are listed as IN_ or SY_ instead of INF or SYS those files did not properly unpack and are not compatible with DeployAnywhere.
• If the driver does not contain an INF file, a CAT file, and the correct folder structure as listed in the INF, it will not work with DeployAnywhere or with Driver Management.
• If the driver is already present in the Driver Database (the DriversDB folder), you will not be able to add a second copy of that same driver. Driver manager takes care if the driver is a different one but has same name or same folder structure , as it reads the driver file and identifies if it’s a unique driver
• There may be some driver files are missing which are mentioned in the driver inf file
• Drivers Files which are copied are corrupted
• Driver files are not signed
• Driver files has inappropriate extension
• Driver has inappropriate architecture mentioned , e.g A driver is of 32 bit architecture but there are entries of 64 bit architecture type.

Make sure you have downloaded driver from an authentic web portal or installing from the valid source. Also try to use latest version of the drivers. If driver source provided in compressed format then extract them and use driver files for import. There are some driver come in a .cab file you may be able to extract cab file and get driver files. There may be some files which are in hidden format , check by using show hidden files option.

You can check manually installing driver using device manager valid drivers will get installed successfully. In such case If you see an issue while importing a driver from Deployment solution console page and you don’t see above mentioned reason for the failure then I suggest to specify the driver and if possible upload the driver to this post, so that we can have a look and determine the reason for the failure.