Adding drivers to a Windows Vista (PE) boot image

There are two methods available for adding drivers to your File Based Images (WIM) which are both described in this FAQ:

• drvload
• peimg
  

Each method described here contains a step-by-step example that will hopefully clarify things a bit.

Answer:

DRVLOAD

Drvload is used to add drivers to a booted Windows Vista PE image (e.g. a running Windows PE system). The command is available from the commandbox that is launched after the winpe.wim boot has completed.

Follow these steps to add a driver to the image:

• boot your machine using the Windows PE image
• once the commandbox has loaded add your driver instantly by running the following command: drvload x:\windows\inf\driver.inf (funny enough the MSDN examples all used C: while I only had X: available)

• Your driver should now have been loaded successfully

Detailed information about the drvload command-line options can be found at this Technet article.

PEIMG

Peimg is used to add drivers to an offline Windows Vista (PE) image (e.g. direct editing of a wim-file on your XP or 2003 system). The command is available from the Windows PE Tools command prompt (made available by installing WAIK).

Follow these steps to add a driver to the image:

• open the Windows PE Tools command prompt
• mount the winpe.wim image: imagex /mountrw c:\path\to\boot.wim 2 c:\mounted_images
  
• note1: make sure you use mountrw or you will not be able to modify the image and the following steps will fail)
• note2: make sure to use 2 when adding drivers to boot.wim and to use 1 when adding drivers to winpe.wim
• add the needed driver(s) with the peimg command: peimg /inf=d:\path\to\driver.inf /image=c:\mounted_images
• Commit the changes to the image: imagex /umount c:\mounted_images /commit

Detailed information about the ImageX command-line options can be found in this Technet article.

Detailed information about the peimg command-line options can be found in this Technet article.

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