Deployment Solution

Hi All,

I've been working on creating a Scripted OS. Currently I have windows xp deploying the machine and installing a number of drivers.

The network driver I have is excellent. It contains the inf files that I need and thats all that the driver needs to work. No exe needs to be run.

however I've been noticing with some of the drivers such as video and sound there is only so far that I can extract the exe from dells website. Currently I've been using the guirunonce within the unattend.txt file to run the executables in silent mode however I've also noticed that there is now a chipset driver to do also which I can only extract down to the point where I need to run an exe?

Is there some way that I can extract the contents so that its just like my network drivers in a nice folder with the .inf .cat and other files needed? I'd rather this method than having to use an installer as the installer could be different depending on which dell model i'm using.

Does anybody have a solution for this and could point me in the right direction?

Any help appreciated

Byron

Hi Byron,

When you unpack Dell Drivers you are usually asked to extract to a particular folder. If you look in that folder you'll usually find the setup files for the user-instigated install, and in the subfolders below the drivers themselves. 

For example, for the Dell 760 you'll download the audio drivers as R197257.exe, which on execution will unpack to C:\dell\drivers\R197257. The install will then begin automatically, and I usually cancel out at this stage.

If you then do a search in here for the .inf file, you'll find two folders appearing..


The amd64 folder is probably not the architecture you want, so the i386 one is for you. Navigate to the c:\dell\drivers\R197257\i386\SMAXWDM\W2K_XP and here are you'll find the drivers in their pure form for your OS and CPU architecture.

This generally applies for most drivers. Sometimes you'll hit a hitch when you can't find any inf files at all in the unpacking folder in c:\dell\drivers. In this case, the installshield setup is probably unpacking them into %temp% (the temporary folder for the current user's profile) so taking a look in there for a just created folder is a good start.

Note: Leave installsheild open when browsing %temp% (don't close or cancel), as InstallShield on closing will clean-up any temporary folders it creates.

Kind Regards,
Ian./

Also Dell provide drivers pack for certain models. Which is a collection of all the drivers in one cab file.