Adding drivers to BartPE, NIC, SATA, video Options

[Ed_P]

Basic BartPE will run on almost all machines. But it may not support all the devices on a given machine or all the capabilities of the devices on the machine. The following are ways to extend the device capabilities of BartPE.

NICs

To add support for a large number of NICs the best option is to add the NIC drivers from the Driverpacks LAN page. After downloading follow the install instructions shown here. (See NB at bottom of this post also)

SATA drives

To add support for a large number of the new harddrive devices the best option is the BTS Driverpacks. Follow the install instructions shown here.

Video

Video, especially Intel graphics, can be a challenge but the VBemp plugin handles most all chips.

Adding specific drivers

Adding a lot of drivers provides a lot of support for many types of machines. It also increases boot time. If your needs are limited to a few machines manually adding just the drivers you need may be a better approach. To that end try Smart Driver Backup. Do make sure the machine's native drivers are compatible with the base OS your using for PEBuilder. ie Vista drivers won't work with XP, XP drivers won't work with Windows Server 2003. You can of course look for compatible drivers at the machine's vendor's site and/or the device's chip manufacturer's site.

When manually creating driver plugins it is necessary to edit the driver's inf file as noted in this paraglider posting: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?s=&...st&p=141511

Sometime you need to manually adjust the inf files. For example change this:

[Manufacturer]
%Intel% = Intel, NTx86, NTIA64
to
[Manufacturer]
%Intel% = Intel, NTx86
so that only the XP 32 drivers are copied. Infcachebuild will not do this for you.

It is however required to delete other lines from the file that will cause device installation to fail ( lines that start with CopyFiles, DelFiles, UpdateInis, DelDirs, RenFiles, Reboot ).

(Formatting changed for different emphasis)

Another caution when adding drivers, do NOT use multiple sets of drivers with the same file name. Just because a file's name is the same does not mean it is the same driver or is backward compatible. This CWU posting describes one such situation well.

And this just in:

Another thing to check when adding driver files to the Net folder is that the inf file is not set to "read-only" or infcachebuild cannot comment out copyfiles etc. and it won't give a warning.

infCacheBuild

After adding drivers to your BartPE system it is recommended that you run infCacheBuild before creating the iso.
You download it, unzip it into your PEbuilder folder, and create a small CMD script in the same folder to run it conveniently.

!infCacheBuild.cmd

CODE

@echo off
echo.
echo !infCacheBuild
echo.
if  %1! == log!  (
   start InfCacheBuild.exe "%~dp0%BartPE" > infcachebuild.log
else
   start InfCacheBuild.exe "%~dp0%BartPE" )
echo.
echo !infCacheBuild Finished.
if %1! == log! echo "%~dp0"infcachebuild.log created.
pause

Or create something similar to that. Pay particular attention to the name and location of the output PEBuilder folder if you didn't take the default values. Then to run infCacheBuild rather than opening a Command Prompt you simply dbl click on the CMD script. infCacheBuild is also a very handy utility to use to ensure all the BartPE files and folders are uppercased properly by adding a filecase.ini file to the PEBuilder folder also.

When running on a Windows 7 host copy the XP or 2003 version of setupapi.dll to the folder where InfCacheBuild.exe is located.
(http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?s=&...st&p=163516)

Adding Drivers and Plugin help

Useful information is available within the PEBuilder Help folders. For example:

pebuilder3110a\help\english\drivers.htm
pebuilder3110a\help\english\plugin.htm
pebuilder3110a\help\english\index.htm

and online at:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/help/english/drivers.htm
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/help/english/plugin.htm

BTW Most if not all PEBuilder drivers, plugins and support utilities work best when a standard PEBuilder folder structure is used and NO spaces or blanks are in the PEBuilder path. Installing PEBuilder to the Windows Desktop or "Program Files" or the "My Documents" folders will not work. A standard PEBuilder folder structure looks like this:

x:\PEBuilder
....|-bartpe.exe
....|-cdrecord.exe
....|-pebuilder.exe
....|-infcachebuild.exe
....|-infcachebuild.cmd
....|-filecase.ini
....|_etc
....|
....|-drivers
....|....|-Net
....|....|...|-NIC driver1
....|....|...|....|-driver 1 files
....|....|...|-NIC driver2
....|....|...|....|-driver 2 files
....|....|...|_etc
....|....|
....|....|-SCSIAdapter
....|....|...|-SCSI driver1
....|....|...|....|-driver 1 files
....|....|...|-SCSI driver2
....|....|...|....|-driver 2 files
....|....|...|_etc
....|
....|-help
....|....|-english
....|....|_etc
....|
....|-lang
....|
....|-plugins
....|....|-!custom
....|....|...|-files
....|....|-a43
....|....|...|-files
....|....|-About
....|....|-autorun
....|....|-bartpe
....|....|_etc
....|....|-DriverPacks.net
....|....|...|-BASE
....|....|...|....|_etc
....|....|...|-MassStorage
....|....|...|....|_etc
....|....|_etc
....|
....|_BartPE
.........|-I386
.........|...|-FONTS
.........|...|-INF
.........|...|_etc
.........|
.........|-Programs
.............|-7-zip
.............|-a43
.............|_etc

NB The latest Driverpacks are found here and the mass storage, LAN and WLAN-Packs are now BartPE compatible. See this Help file for instructions how to use them with BartPE. And note that the BartPE instructions apply to ALL the driverpacks now, particularly the part about "Extract / install the DriverPacks Base program".

hth

This post has been edited by Ed_P: Aug 22 2010, 09:05 AM