How to backup all drivers

the_technocratthe_technocrat IC-MotY1Indy Icrontian
edited February 2007 in Science & Tech
Hey all,

I have about 400 machines at my work, and they consist mainly of about 10-15 different configurations, thanks to a previous admin... :rolleyes:

Sooo... My options are to use Ghost 2003 to make 10-15 images, one for each config, or to harvest all of the drivers from each machine config type and have on bigger image that will work on anything.

I'd prefer the latter. Where do I start? I'm guessing it's not as easy as going to C:\somedir and copying *.inf to some network location, then dumping all of the .inf files down to a machine and imaging it? So my monster-image would have all of the drivers in the right directory so any of the 15 machine configs will auto-discover any driver they need?

If someone could help out, that would be great! Thanks!

Comments

  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited February 2007
    Drivers are a bit tricky. In the system directory (c:\windows or c:\winnt) you can harvest all "PNF" and "INF" files from the INF directory. If you add that to your image, WinXP will know what all the devices are and should pick up any of the old ones (say from about 3 years ago) and let you know what the device is. Worse case, you may need to grab drivers but at least you'll know what drivers to grab....
  • zero-counterzero-counter Linux Lubber San Antonio Member
    edited February 2007
    Or you could just slipstream the drivers into the windows release and use a RIS/Imaging server/Folder share to do a network install. Nlite is great for that.

    That release would then be used to image the one machine as the baseline image and could be released the the other systems if you wanted to go that far. Ensure that all of the systems are of the same computer type (acpi)
  • QCHQCH Ancient Guru Chicago Area - USA Icrontian
    edited February 2007
    I believe he has dozens of different chipsets so slipstreaming all the drivers could make the image huge. I mentioned the issue with the PC TYPE may be all over the place (STANDARD PC, ACPI, UNIPROCESSOR, MULTIPROCESSOR)...
  • zero-counterzero-counter Linux Lubber San Antonio Member
    edited February 2007
    QCH2002 wrote:
    I believe he has dozens of different chipsets so slipstreaming all the drivers could make the image huge.
    As far as slip streaming all fo the computer chipsets, it was a valid suggestion being that I currently have a Windows XP SP2 image with VIA/SIS/INTEL chipsets integrated, on top of the latest SATA drivers from the leading chipsets, NVIDIA MCP and Geforce drivers, etc. After removing extras from the image like the support folder, included ms games, sample music and video, legacy drivers and so on, I managed to get the image to just under 620mb. If you would like, I could give you a write up on how to maximize the potential of an Nlite image as it is a great tool
    QCH2002 wrote:
    I mentioned the issue with the PC TYPE may be all over the place (STANDARD PC, ACPI, UNIPROCESSOR, MULTIPROCESSOR)...

    IThis potential issue was already taken into account by addressing it here..."Ensure that all of the systems are of the same computer type (acpi)"

    As the old saying goes, "there are more than one ways to skin a cat".
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited February 2007
    It doesn't matter what HAL type the computer uses if you decompress the driver packages and put them in the right folders in subfolders to $OEM$ and reference them in the winnt.sif file. Doing it this way, making drivers available in the PNP/GUI section of the Windows setup, bypasses txt mode setup and lets the PC select whatever HALs it needs. When it goes to do the detection/installation of devices, it'll pull the drivers it needs from the proper folders there, as well.
  • zero-counterzero-counter Linux Lubber San Antonio Member
    edited February 2007
    Thrax wrote:
    It doesn't matter what HAL type the computer uses if you decompress the driver packages and put them in the right folders in subfolders to $OEM$ and reference them in the winnt.sif file. Doing it this way, making drivers available in the PNP/GUI section of the Windows setup, bypasses txt mode setup and lets the PC select whatever HALs it needs. When it goes to do the detection/installation of devices, it'll pull the drivers it needs from the proper folders there, as well.

    What we were referring to is a custom imaged machine to be used over and over again through whatever imaging process, when discussing the kernel type. Everything else was referencing the iso and it use in a deployment scenario.
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