MDT Injecting Drivers still does not bring up network in PE

Question

Laptop: HP HDX X16T-1200 CTO Drivers: Taken from the HP Site and extracted.

Imported in to MDT 2013. When I launch the Lite Touch it pops up an image saying it can not find the ImageDeploymentShare via DHCP so it looks like even with the network drivers injected I still get nothing.

ipconfig /all shows nothing.

Is this a driver or PE issue? I did research and I know this system works with Windows 8 and the drivers. But for some reason the network does not seem to work from PE.

EDIT: I have now found other drivers recently for Windows 8. I still can not get MDT to get past the DHCP issue. IPConfig still shows no network settings.

Solution

Are you using Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to boot via PXE?

Assuming you are, when you "imported in to MDT", did you also update the deployment share and add the updated WinPE boot image (x86 or x64, or both) to WDS?

The boot images are located in "\NAME\DeploymentShare$\Boot". Add them using the WDS MMC (below).

The screenshot also shows multiple versions of boot images taken from deployment shares after they were added to WDS.

Sounds like you are deploying Windows 8, so this doesn't matter, but for others who may come along, MDT 2013 uses WinPE 5.0 so you need to inject Windows 8 drivers into the WinPE boot images even if deploying Windows 7.

references: http://www.deploymentresearch.com/Research/tabid/62/EntryId/112/MDT-2013-Lite-Touch-Driver-Management.aspx

Related Serverfault question - see part 2 of the question/answer

Comments

[Bin]

Please confirm that you are using a freshly created ISO after you completely regenerated the boot image. Do you have a selection profile selected for your boot image that includes the new drivers?

[Jason]

Yep, I added the drivers and even have them included. I'll add pictures

[iPaulo]

Your images look good. They recommend trying to inject the minimum set of drivers into the WinPE to reduce the amount of data that needs to be tftp'd, but for troubleshooting, "all drivers and packages" is aok.

[Elliot Huffman]

Instead of trying to use HP's drivers try driverpacks.net. Their drier packages work on MOST (never seen any that does not work) hardware.

[Jason]

I believe that I imported directly from an extracted .ISO file so I never touched or use WDS but I do have WDS running on the network. I did do a full update on the deployment share for MDT

[iPaulo]

I can't profess to be an expert, so your configuration could be different. But at least in our rather default setup of MDT 2013, the process depends on WDS. It would have been installed by MDT. The default WinPE boot iso included with WDS will boot most systems so you haven't need to be aware of the WDS dependency. After updating the deployment share, update the WDS WinPE images with those found in the MDT deployment share.

[iPaulo]

To verify, do you have an older system available that does boot into WinPE successfully & does get a dhcp address? If so, shut down WDS on your MDT server and try to boot that system. It should fail.