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Installation of Drivers from a Removable Location May Not Work with a Sysprep Image

Article ID: 304974 - View products that this article applies to.

This article was previously published under Q304974

SYMPTOMS

When the Mini-Setup program attempts to verify a driver that is embedded in a Microsoft System Preparation (Sysprep) image, the program prompts the user for the driver, unless the original driver is still in the original installation location. Typically, this prompt occurs when the OEM driver had been installed from a removable location, such as, a network drive or floppy disk, during the preparation of the master image, and the related Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) device has a different hardware identification (ID) on the target computer compared to the master computer, but the device uses the same driver.

If the driver is copied on the local drive of the target computer, and the "OEMPnpDriversPath" entry in the Sysprep.inf file is modified, the driver may not be installed.

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CAUSE

This problem can occur because Mini-Setup, for performance reasons, expects that the OEM drivers that are embedded in a Sysprep image are located in their original installation location, as stored in the OEMxx.pnf file. When the original location is on a network drive, CD-ROM, or floppy disk, that location may not be accessible on the target computer.

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RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, use the -pnp command-line switch when you run the Sysprep tool (Sysprep.exe). A full Plug and Play re-enumeration of all devices is performed, which can add from 5 through 10 minutes to the Sysprep mini-wizard process.

NOTE: If you use the -pnp switch with Sysprep version 1.1 and you use the [SysprepMassStorage] section, you may observe that some mass-storage controllers that are not physically present in the target computers are displayed in Device Manager. This behavior does not affect the computers, and the behavior can be ignored.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

253340

(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253340/EN-US/ )

Non-Present SCSI Devices Appear in Device Manager When You Are Using Sysprep Version 1.1

If you do not want to use the -pnp command-line switch, you can use either of the following two workaround methods:

Install OEM drivers on the master image from the local drive and enable the driver to be available at the same location so that the driver can be present on the local drive of the target computer when Mini-Setup is used.
Remove all of the Oemxx.inf and Oemxx.pnf (where "xx" can be any digit) files from the %Systemroot%\Inf folder of the target computer before you run the Sysprep tool.

This workaround applies only to .inf-based installations. For drivers that are installed by means of a self-extracting .exe file, you have to manually extract the files of the driver on the local drive, and then install the driver by using the extracted .inf file.

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