How to support two different hardware configurations?

mostlyhuman

New Member
I want to create an image with preinstalled apps for both my laptop and desktop which have different hardware configurations/drivers. Is there a way to put this in the same image where it will work correctly or if not is there perhaps a way to have a menu when I run the installer that lets me choose between two images as far as which one to use? Thank you for any help or guidance!
 
If you have to support multiple PC models, the normal answer is to make one shared image and integrate all the drivers for every PC model. There's nothing wrong with this approach, as long as none of the drivers conflict. An example would be you need an older driver for one PC, but a newer version of the same driver for another.

Adding extra drivers increases the ISO and installed Windows size, but not terribly larger. Where some users get into trouble is trying to add the AMD or NVIDIA graphics drivers, and load the entire folder, instead of picking a specific device INF file. Due to the way drivers are imported, if you add a folder, NTLite will load every driver instance it finds. For NVIDIA, this spells disaster because each driver adds a parallel copy of the NVIDIA libraries along with the basic driver (bloating the DriverStore). Picking one driver instance means you only get one copy.

One the other hand, if there's a reason to allow the user to choose a customized HW image, you can include two or more install images in the ISO. You would make a common install image, then export a second copy and append it to the install WIM. Then add a different set of drivers to each image, and rename the images for clarity.

This method works, but involves more effort and usually isn't recommended. But it's there as an option.
 
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