Video Screencast Help
Search Video Help Close Back
to help
New in the Rewards Catalog: Vouchers for "Symantec Technical Specialist" and "Symantec Certified Specialist" exams.

Troubleshooting WinPE Driver Problems

Updated: 24 Jan 2007
eorme's picture
eorme
Symantec Employee
+2 2 Votes
Login to vote

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.

blog entry Filed Under:
, , ,

Technical Support

Symantec.com

Store

Community Stats

Total Content Items
Members
258,905