Generic image for random PCs

M

Markosphere

New Member
Hi all,
I bought the 'home' license of NTLite, mainly to try out creating images for hands-off deployment. I've had good success creating an image for my own second laptop (same brand and age as my main one). It boots, wipes the disk, installs W10 pro, connects to WiFi and installs office without any input from me. I love all the settings I was able to tweak in NTLite before deployment.

I've been trying to create a similar image to deploy on any PC regardless of the hardware involved. But I can't get any of mine to work with any machine whose hardware is significantly different to my own laptop on which I made the image. I'm happy to add the drivers post install - what I'm mainly interested in is the automation I achieved with the above project. I've searched and I can't find any kind of walk-through as to how to approach this. Is it even possible?
 
The normal answer is Windows Update finds "updated" drivers for you. Some people argue it's not useful, because WU doesn't pick the best driver matching your setup. That's probably true, but MS has the only repository with 100% verified drivers.

Other people like 3rd-party driver installers (like drp.su, Snappy or whatever). This depends on your trust factor, since all their repositories are unofficial copies (maybe identical, maybe tweaked). Another solution is integrating driver packs for more popular HW.

It's not going to be really automated, except for pre-installing the tools.
 
I should have been clearer with my problem. I’m finding that if a PC’s hardware is significantly different to my laptop, the windows setup process will not complete. Either it will halt and complain about drivers related to the disk or after the first reboot, the screen will show just distorted, unreadable graphics and come to a halt.
 
Some drivers may need to go into the boot.wim - Microsoft Windows Setup. Hmm, Windows 10, that should have built in drivers for most things.
 
Device detection fails when your image is for the wrong host type (UEFI vs BIOS). The distorted screen is the clue, since all graphics will normally display SVGA without drivers.
 
garlin said:
Device detection fails when your image is for the wrong host type (UEFI vs BIOS). The distorted screen is the clue, since all graphics will normally display SVGA without drivers.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure everything was UEFI - but I'll double check. Thanks for the input!
 
Markosphere said:
I’m finding that if a PC’s hardware is significantly different to my laptop, the windows setup process will not complete.
Click to expand...
As long as you don't remove standard drivers I think you won't have problems with windows setup. Windows installs standard drivers for video, storage and essentials. What can happen is things like networking not working due to lack of drivers.

You can use Snappy Driver Installer Origin and download the driver packs you find most useful to install without relying on the internet (eg network drivers).
 
If you don't speak about special RAID-Controllers you should be good with the Windows built in standard drivers.

The only drivers i usually integrate are the new Intel VMD (boot.wim) as some newer Laptops need them or Windows Setup can't find any SSD.
www.intel.com

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (10th and 11th Gen Platforms)

www.intel.com www.intel.com

and the latest Intel Inf. into install.wim -> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19347/chipset-inf-utility.html (you need to extract)

There is also a good package (Storage & Network drivers) on the Dell Website for boot.wim -> https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-uk/000108642/winpe-10-driver-pack
 
I think this is a good discussion. I don't have access to newer hardware so everything in the Windows 10 image is sufficient for what I use. So far the ISO I've created works on all the devices I've tested.

I only had a problem when I created the ISO in legacy bios mode and removed a driver that was needed for UEFI :p but then I mounted an untouched image in uefi mode and it was easy to find what was missing.

So here's the tip, if possible make your custom isos in uefi mode to avoid this kind of problem that will probably work in legacy bios too.
 
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