Back in Vista/WinPE2 days, I recall going though some pain trying to load network and storage drivers into a live WinPE instance. I vaguely recall giving up. This experience has prevented me from even trying to do such a thing in more recent years. However, today I really wanted to avoid building new WinPE media just to test the validity of a driver. Fortunately, it appears WinPE has come a long way…
- Get you driver, load it to removable media, connect the media to your running WinPE instance.
- “cd” to the driver directory
- Run “drvload [path to inf file]“
- If you just loaded a network driver, run “wpeutil initializeNetwork”.
- Done!
This procedure allowed me to get an OS deployment done now, rather then spending hours loading drivers into our MS Deployment Workbench, rebuilding media, and testing, testing, testing.