Creating a generic (hardware independent) Windows 10 installation media with latest updates?

H

henris

New Member
I'm evaluating NTLite to be used in our Windows 10 installation process. We build custom PCs and thus the hardware and drivers differ most times. We would like to inject latest updates to the Windows image especially for Windows 10 Enterprise 2019 LTSC which takes a lot of time and reboots to update online. We are not looking to include any special drivers but the original generic drivers should be there. We are using autounattend.xml for automated installation.

The updates part seemed to go well and according to tutorials. It nicely matched our manual dism / Microsoft catalog based method. But I do not understand the drivers part. If i want the original drivers from the original installation media to be available what should I select/do? When I went through couple of the tutorials and produced an USB media, the installation failed with drivers missing error. The other documentation seemed to indicate that the drivers are based either the computer creating the image or hwlist exported from a target computer. We want neither, we want a generic driver set identical to the original Windows 10 installation media.

I think I'm missing something obvious as this must be one of the most common use cases. I just could not find a tutorial which I could follow and have a working installation media.

Any help is appreciated!
 
Solution
H
I can confirm that the simplified process worked. So fully automated Win 10 Enterprise IoT 2019 LTSC installation with 2021-10 updates integrated! From start to finish it took ~20 minutes where most of the time was spent in the update integration.

The simplified process
  1. Windows \ Mount original ISO-image
  2. Windows \ Copy original install.wim from the mounted image to a working dir <workdir>
  3. NTLite \ Start \ Source \ Add \ Image File <workdir>\install.wim
  4. NTLite \ Start \ Source \ Load the added image
  5. NTLite \ Integrate \ Updates \ Add \ Latest online updates.
    1. The default selected ones seem to be correct latest updates.
    2. Enqueue updates (to be downloaded, extracted and integrated when writing the final...
Tnx. As I have posted before, I always disable the Internet connection when installing Windows. I keep MS from asking me to create a Microsoft Account during install. And now I see another benefit of having (some) control over what is installed during a clean install.
 
pmikep said:
I always disable the Internet connection when installing Windows.
Click to expand...
I've always done this on previous versions of Windows, with Windows 10 it's even more mandatory for me. Another benefit is to finish the installation much faster :) in recent builds of Windows 10 the first OOBE screen (where you interact with the setup by entering the desired language, username, etc) takes much longer to appear if you are connected to the internet, I don't know why.
 
AeonX said:
I've always done this on previous versions of Windows, with Windows 10 it's even more mandatory for me. Another benefit is to finish the installation much faster :) in recent builds of Windows 10 the first OOBE screen (where you interact with the setup by entering the desired language, username, etc) takes much longer to appear if you are connected to the internet, I don't know why.
Click to expand...

That's OOBE WU checking for critical updates. It can't be blocked, but you can use a localhost WSUS to skip over it.
 
It seems easier to me to either pull the Ethernet plug or turn the Wi-Fi modem off (or don't give Windows a password for the WiFi) during install.
 
garlin said:
That's OOBE WU checking for critical updates. It can't be blocked, but you can use a localhost WSUS to skip over it.
Click to expand...
It makes sense. That's why before Edge came inside cumulative update on first boot in VM when I forgot to disable network the new Edge just popped out of nowhere without explanation :p
 
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