Dell is one of the largest vendors for enterprise machines, and it is common to need to add drivers for their systems into the Ghost Solution Suite or Deployment Solution for preboot OS support and for DeployAnywhere driver targeting. Dell, like some manufacturers, has proprietary versions of some third party hardware devices, notably Intel network adapters. There are some iterations of these network adapters for which Intel's published driver packages do not cover. Not having the appropriate drivers are usually evidenced by a lack of network support in the preboot environment (resulting in failure of imaging jobs), or a failure on the driver retargeting step in DeployAnywhere. Here is an example of a failed attempt by DeployAnywhere to add a driver:
The error message above indicates that DeployAnywhere does not have a driver specified for the hardware device ID. In the example above, this machine does not have network support after the image has been deployed and has been rebooted into the production operating system.
Fortunately, Dell has a repository of drivers needed for deploying these systems. Here is a link to Dell Command | Deploy - Driver Packs for Enterprise Client OS Deployment. There is a comprehensive list of machine models, and it is likely that you will be able to find the appropriate model. However, the primary thing to know is that some drivers might not be listed as available for the OS you want. The primary cab files present are listed by the WinPE preboot operating systems. Here is a list of them and their equivalent versions of Windows (red text added by author of this article):
If you need a guide to matching network cards and drivers, please refer to the article Matching Network Cards & Drivers. This will show how to identify hardware devices by their device IDs, and how to identify if a given driver matches the device. Most device manufacturers release several updates to drivers each year, and new machines may need newer driver versions. Success as an imaging administrator often relies on the ability to collect the appropriate device drivers.