Hey Weedee

It would be nice to know which operating system your talking about.

If it's windows xp you can do this in your "mini-setup" with your unattended.txt file
And if it's windows 7 you can use i think it's dism to inject your drivers.

Kind Regards
Morten Leth

Does this work beyond Windows 2000?  I haven't tried this before, but found this article at MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa376957

Here's the example command:

RUNDLL32.EXE SETUPAPI.DLL,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 C:\WINDOWS\INF\SHELL.INF

Hey Weedee

As mclemson suggested, that way could be a possible way to accomplish what you want to do.

Hmm, granted you could change the unattended.txt file within your image, but you could also just overwrite the existing one which is in the image, you simply do a filecopy in the same winpe after having destributed your image down to the client.
I believe that would be the easiest way to do what you want to do without having the need to maintain a cmd file with all of your inf files.

Kind Regards
Morten Leth

I realise that you probably want to deliver your drivers at build time as suggested above, but if you want script the installation here are some ideas.

DPInst.exe (Microsoft) offers a way to install inf file based drivers from the command line (or batch file).  Helpful links on this:

http://www.msigeek.com/285/creating-installation-for-device-driver-applications-using-dpinst

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/install/difxtools.mspx

I have also had success in the past with signed PnP drivers using the DIFxApp merge module to deliver inf file based drivers from an msi.  This is also part of the Driver Install Frameworks (DIFx)

The AppDeploy link below has several useful suggestions for delivering drivers, including some detail on using the DIFxApp merge module.

http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/tm.asp?m=20827

Regards,
Darren.

Yikes people, how about the easy way:

1. If you're using "Windows 7", why not take advantage of the driver pre-staging utility that is built right into the OS? W7 ships with a driver utility called "PNPUTIL". Issuing a command as such will add the drivers:

   PNPUTIL -a "X:\Path to Driver File\Driver.inf"

   This will process the INF and copy the CAT/SYS/INF (and any DLL, EXE, etc) into the "DriverStore" folder... which is the same place Windows stores all the in-built drivers ready for auto plug-and-play instalaltion.
    

2. If that's not an option for you, look for "DPInst.exe" (or "DPInst64.exe" for 64-bit systems). These are available as part of the Windows PDK (available free from Microsoft) and will process all INFs in the location you put the file and attempt to pre-stage them. This method tries to copy files to the "Drivers", "CatRoot", and "INF" locations which are not as reliable... and it can occassionally fail to copy required DLLs to "System32" folders etc... but 99% of the time (for simple drivers) it just works. I can arrange to send them to you if you can't find them.

Since I found the option (1) above, that has been my best friend. I use option 2 to isntall Canon USB printers and scanners on our base images, etc... so I know that works too.

A final option. Look for the original manufactuer's site and see if they have a different driver. Quite often the ones on a vendor's site (i.e. Lenovo) are quite old anyway. I've also had success using other country sites like Japan CSD and Canada for Toshiba drivers in the past.