DC7900 imaging with WinPE 2 (SATA Driver issues)

I have seen this many times. The problem with this model is it is heavily refreshed by the OEM. So newer versions of the SATA controller gets put out. I have also had better luck downloading the driver from intel and not the oem. When the OEM creats a product they usually are about 6 months behind on the newest and best driver the hardware manufacturer has on their site. Also try setting the bios setting to Legacy, AHCI or RAID. Find one that works.

hope this helps

Thanks for your reply viddect,

Unfortunately no BIOS settings work. IDE emulation still doesn't pick up the HDD. (SATA and RAID obviously don't if the ICH10 driver isn't loaded).

I've tried the latest drivers from intel, as well as HP.
My last (failed) attempt, I used a driver harvesting tool to grab the working driver off a box built with Vista. So this is DEFINITELY a working ICH10 driver for the 7900... in Vista anyway (which should be all good for WinPE 2 I thought?)

As I said though, I can't get my boot disk creator to add the silly thing into the WinPE image... anyone know how to manually add the driver if the boot disk creator doesn't work? 

Yes Vista driver is the one you have to inject

try this:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=3785404&prodNameId=3785039&swEnvOID=2096&swLang=13&mode=2&taskId=135&swItem=vc-65580-1

I have just used HP's driver in ahci mode for a few hundred quite successfully.  I would note one thing, that is that whatever mode of operation the image was made in is the mode it must be run in.  This was tested between ahci and ide modes.  I am assuming that would be true for the raid mode as well.  In other words, I would try to get all dc7900s to be operating in the same mode.  It could save many headaches later.

Thanks for the help guys...

Unfortunately I'm still not able to get it working. Mohammad, I tried that specific driver but the 'have disk' function of the boot disk creator still won't pick it up.

DArmitage, the base image is XP sysprepped with the right drivers in there. It's a hardware independant image, and uses sysprep to detect and install the correct drivers. This works fine, as if I drop it on using DOS imaging it all works. (It will pick up the emulation mode at the time sysprep installs the device drivers. AHCI/RAID/IDE all work here fine as sysprep uses whatever it sees).

The issue I'm trying to solve here is the WinPE PXE image, as at the moment it can't see the storage controller... I'm using the (correct I'm assuming) vista drivers, but Altiris boot disk creator won't let me add them. It lists the devices found in the .inf fine, but adding them doesn't bring them up in the driver list when I hit 'refresh'....

Surely someone has gotten WinPE 2 working with a dc7900? :)

markfleming:

Are you using 6.9 SP1? There is a bug with 'Have Disk'. See:

https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=19067&p=1

and

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/better-way-update-nic-card-drivers

DArmitage:

I wrote an article which explains how to add MSD's to your image which should allow any of the modes to work:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/adding-intel-matrix-drivers-your-xp-image-ahci-sata-support

I had a similar situation not too long ago.  I use WIM images for Vista along with WinPE so it might not be the exact same situation but might give you some ideas if you haven't found an answer yet.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/ima...

Thanks guys... really appreciate all the help.

I am using 6.9 SP1, so I have been manually copying the driver files to the \platforms\winpe2...\Drivers folder. The boot disk creator still creates the .txt files, but the bug stops it from dropping the inf and sys files in there. I have been adding them manually.

Brandon/Kubasa, believe it or not I already had been scouring both of your posts to look for answers there... there was a link in the comments section of your article that let me to a method for manually injecting drivers straight into the .wim file. I'm loaded up imagex and tried that, and to my surprise the driver files were already there!
So they are definitely being added to the winPE image, it's just not picking them up  when my dc7900 boots to WinPE for some reason.

Now normally I would assume I'd screwed up and gotten the wrong drivers, but I'm 100% sure the hardware_id for the SATA controller is the same... I'm going crazy here, I'm SURE I've got the right driver (VEN_8086&DEV_3A02)... anyway, I'll try some more things. That advice about adding the files manually looks good, but there's no I386 folder in the platforms\WinPE2 subdir structure, so I'm guessing a little bit.

I'll try some more things and post again.

Hi everyone,

I'm facing the exact same problem when using BDC/"Have disk" method.

But the problem seems to be occuring ONLY with Intel Matrix Storage drivers (I tried with Promise and nVidia RAID adapters and some INTEL nics drivers and it worked)
Modifying the TXTSETUP.OEM "default" section did not change anything.
I Tried upgrading to 6.9 SP2. I still cannot inject my storage drivers via the BDC interface.

Did you have any luck putting the PCI vendor id's to the txtsetup.sif file?  That's what did the trick for me.  Well, that and then rebuilding WinPE after I modified the txtsetup.sif file.

I added the following to my txtsetup.sif file (in the appropriate fields):

[HardwareIdsDatabase]
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2652&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_24DF&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_25B0&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C3&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2652&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2653&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C1&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C5&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2681&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2821&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2829&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2822&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C6&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2682&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_27C3&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2652&CC_0104 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2922&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_2929&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A02&CC_0106 = "iastor"
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_3A22&CC_0106 = "iastor"

[SCSI.Load]
iastor = iastor.sys,4

Because I have somewhat of a mess, I ended up making this change to one file and then I copied it to my WinPE 2005\i386 folder and to my Bootwiz\platforms\WinPE\x86\BASE\i386\ before I did the rebuild WinPE.  Again, I'm using a WIM image for my Vista image which kicks in ImageX.  Is your image in a wim format or are you using an img file?

Hey Rand... good to see I'm not the only one.

I can confirm that NIC drivers added using 'Have Disk' all work fine (barring the 6.9 SP1 missing files issue of course). My issue is just with this one storage driver as well.
I take it this is a known issue? Does anyone from Symantec/Altiris have any comment about how to get around it?

Thanks Kubasa... I reckon you're spot on. The driver files are being added to the .wim image, but for some reason it's not finding the device ids.

I'm using winPE2, so there doesn't seem to be any .sif files at all, or any i386 folder. Bear in mind this isn't a production vista image, it's simply the Pre-boot Enviroment image that's used to dump my 'real' image file on (if that makes sense?).
So Altiris creates a boot.wim file through the boot disk creator. If I open it using imagex, all the drivers and .inf files are in separate folders under \Drivers.
I can't seem to find the master file (like txtsetup.sif) where altiris must put all the device ids... I reckon if I can find that and add it in, we should be sweet... 

The ahci and iastore drivers are in a single download from HP.  Search for DC7900 for support.  PIck the Vista Enterprise 32, Storage drivers.  The ahci download points to download sp41463 which, when run, makes a folder of the same  name.  Use the have disk to add drivers to PXE PE2.1 and navigate to that folder, then to deployment\f6flpy32.  In there are both the ahci and iastore drivers.  If the "have disk" doesn't work, just copy that folder to your deployment Solution\bootwiz\platforms\WinPE2\x86\Drivers\custom\Drivers.  This is where "have disk" puts them.  Then rebuild your PXE files for PE2.1 through PXE config and you should be in business.

Hmm....not sure what to say.   I had to do this with our OptiPlex 755's.  When the 760's came out, I did a scan in my eXpress share to find these files initially because I couldn't remember where they were.  I thought that was a default file that was a part of WinPE 2.1 but I could be wrong.  Also, check out this link:  http://www.deployvista.com/Blog/tabid/70/EntryID/1... There might be something in this link that I'm failing to mention.

I just tried the link from my post and it didn't work,  Here it is again:  http://www.deployvista.com/Blog/tabid/70/EntryID/1...

Hi Guys,

I've been trying to sort this out for the last two weeks, but still haven't gotten anywhere.

I've patched my DS to 6.9 SP2, and made sure I have the latest altiris supplied build of WinPE 2.1.

The have disk STILL doesn't work for storage drivers. I have made sure that all the files are in the drivers\custom\drivers folder, but the driver doesn't show up in the list during boot disk creator, and if I compile the winPE image and try to use it, the DC7900 still won't pick it up. 

Everything I can find in KBs and other forums says that the boot disk creator should work fine for WinPE 2.1. All the paths specified for manually adding drivers in WinPE 1.6 don't exist in 2.1, so that way isn't working either.

I'm stumped! At this rate I'm going to have to go back to DOS imaging!

Here are my troubleshooting steps.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/troubleshooting-driver-issues-your-winpe-bootdisk

Easy as that? Great...

Thanks again for your help, Brandon.