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Forums > Deployment Solutions > MDT 2008
Subject: 5Reccomended strutce for drivers in MDT
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Paul M. HibbertUser is Offline

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07/23/2008 9:35 AM  

Good day everyone,

What is the most effective design structure for adding vendor specific drivers to MDT? Do I use $OEM$ and create sub folders for each type of driver? Should I make distinctions between desktop and laptops? Plus is MDT more forgiving for drivers that are not WQHL signed by Microsoft? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!!

FarmerPeteUser is Offline

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07/23/2008 10:03 AM  
You can do a plethora of different things. I guess it depends on how much stuff you really have, if they are "nice" drivers or the red-headed stepchild drivers, or if they conflict directly with other models. If they are nice, you can use the Out-of-box drivers, setup driver groups, and then use the MDT database to assign driver groups to make-model combinations. That's the easiest way, but not all drivers will work in the Out-Of-Box drivers area. For reference, I have all of my drivers in Out-Of-Box drivers for 10 major models of IBM laptops, 5 models of IBM desktops, 4 models of HP desktops, 3 models of HP laptops, and a Fujitsu tablet. Out of all of those systems, I have 1 driver that I can't add to the Out-Of-box drivers. Not to shabby.

The other method I've personally done for a few select instances, (I have one model where the install order will make or break the install) is package all of the installs into silent installs, and then manually add them to the task sequence in the correct order.
PyrosoftUser is Offline

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07/23/2008 11:37 AM  

Name your driver groups the same name that WMI returns under the MODEL header – for example “DC7800 Small Form Factor”

Then in your Deploy task sequence use the “Set task sequence variable” task and populate it with the following

 

Task Sequence Variable = DriverGroup001

Value = %MODEL%

 

This should be the 2nd item in the deployment sequence and follow on from a Gather.

Delete any references to Driver Groups from customsettings

 

Even if you don’t have any issues with drivers coming in at the moment then it would be best to use this naming convention to save some hassle for later.

To update the group names that are in place at the moment edit control\DriverGroups.xml

All of the important bits are done with GUIDs so just update the tag for your existing groups and you’ll be good to go.

 

A quick way to find out the exact model name to use in the driver group name is the command line

“wmic computersystem get model”

 

And for any drivers that object to being installed through PNP you can just add the setup.exe (or whatever) as an app install based on the %model% variable post sysprep.

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Forums > Deployment Solutions > MDT 2008 > 5Reccomended strutce for drivers in MDT



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