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Troubleshooting WinPE Driver Problems

eorme's picture
eorme
January 10th, 2007
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Sometimes when working with specialized hardware, such as SCSI controllers, strange NICs, or other obscure hardware, buggy drivers can seem impossible to get around. I have had this problem for a long time and found a utility online that will help diagnose these problems.

Step 1:

Go to: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html
and download DriverView, a free utility for viewing drivers.

Step 2:

Using the Boot Disk Creator, edit your PXE image and put this little 32kb executable in your systemroot directory.

Step 3:

Create a WinPE script that simply has the word "pause" in it, and boot your machine.

Step 4:

When WinPE boots (whether or not it is able to load the NIC driver) you'll get a command prompt (you may need to maximize it from the lower left hand corner). Run X:\i386\driverview.exe and you'll be able to see all drivers that are loaded and all their information!

Note: There are also command line switches listed on the DriverView website that will write all the driver information to a file.

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