A Better Way of Adding Drivers to WDS Boot Images

Today, I tried to use WDS to deploy to a laptop that had an NIC that the normal WDS boot image couldn't deal with. After a brief display of "Setup is starting", the client threw an error talking about how an error occurred while starting networking. It wanted me to add the NIC drivers to the boot image, so I looked online for instructions on doing that. I found KB923834, which seemed to perfectly match my problem at first. However, I soon discovered that the setup log doesn't contain the error spew the article mentioned and, despite having the Windows AIK installed, I don't have a "Windows AIK" directory in Program Files. Also, I really wasn't looking forward to doing the supercomplicated procedure to solve an issue that can't be that unusual.

So, I continued my search for help and turned up some very nice tutorials on doing this. In summary, that KB article is super old (for Windows Server 2003?) and WDS has come a long way since then. The general procedure for adding drivers to a PE boot image is:

• Find the NIC driver and unpack it to an INF with supporting files
• Disable the boot image (to prevent it from being sent to a client during servicing)
• Add a driver package (under the Drivers section of the WDS snap-in)
• Point the wizard at the INF and create a driver group if you want
• Open the "add drivers to boot image" wizard for your boot image
• Use the default search terms to search for drivers, check the box for your new drivers
• Complete the wizard and wait a super long time for it to mount, modify, and unmount the WIM
• Re-enable the boot image

Tristan Watkins wrote a more filled-out backstory and procedure (with pictures) for this. It helped me immensely.