How do I update our PXE boot drivers with the new Dell WinPE11 Drivers?

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

Hello,

I am trying to update the WinPE drivers used for network PXE boot.
The new Dell USBC to ethernet dongles are not able to PXE boot.
We can PXE boot and complete a bare metal deployment successfully with old dongles. So it’s not that the PXE boot DHCP options are incorrect or that the WinPE drivers for the specific model are missing.
Can I add the Dell WinPE11 drivers to the MDT Boot image and then upload?
Is it better to upload directly to the bare metal server through the WebUI?
Is there a way to do this through the console?
What is the best practice for accomplishing this?
I’ve done a fair amount of researching and everything I find references WinPE after PXE booting has already successfully completed but nothing referencing the WinPE drivers if you cannot PXE boot at all.

[JasonWalker]

You’d do this in the console, using the “Driver Management” dashboard in the “OS Deployments and Bare Metal Imaging” Site.

WinPE 10 will show up as one of the Images on which you can manually assign drivers, if the automatic driver detection isn’t working.

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

What if I added the WinPE11 drivers to the MDT deployment share and then uploaded?
Would that work?

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

Sorry I’m an old MDT/MEMCM guy. Have many 100s if not 1000s of hours creating custom task sequences.
My curiosity overwhelms me sometimes.

[sergio_tarchi]

Hello,
if the new Dell USBC to ethernet dongle has PXE boot capability but it’s not working because the WinPE cannot connect to the bare metal server once loaded, you have to bind its driver to WinPE 10 x64 image.
As first you have to import the driver in the Driver Library tab of the Driver Library dashboard.
Then you can generate the binding grid of your target computer model with the image “WinPE 10 x64” in the Bindings tab of the Driver Library dashboard.
The dongle device is probably not listed in the PCI devices inventory of your computer model (because it should not be a PCI device) so, to bind its driver to the specific binding grid, you have to manually bind it, clicking on the button “Add driver” and selecting it the list.
After that you save your changes and that the automatically launched sync action has been completed on the bare metal server, you can retry the PXE boot and this time the driver will be injected into the WinPE before trying the connection to the bare metal server.
Thanks.

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

Thank you for the reply.

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

Thank you for the detailed reply.
I am still wondering what the effect would be if WinPE drivers were added to MDT before uploading to BF.

[sergio_tarchi]

Hi.
Do you mean injecting drivers into the winpe.wim image included in the WADK before creating the MDT Bundle?
It should also solve the issue on that computer model because the drivers will be seen as “built in” into the WinPE image. In this case all the computers using that WinPE image will see those drivers as built in, while if you use the BigFix OSD driver binding grid, the drivers will be actually loaded into the WinPE only for that specific model they belong to, following the driver bindings into the bindings grid.

[Audi_Fan_Boy]

Yes, sort of. Using the MDT Deployment Workbench, the WinPE boot image can be modified to include other drivers by importing them. If I import the Dell WinPE drivers and then regenerate the boot image then upload to BigFix will this break anything, and will the drivers be present in the WinPE boot image?

[orbiton]

@Audi_Fan_Boy can you please explain what do you want to accomplish?

If I understand you correctly, because the driver is non-PCI - You should use driver Binding for each model.
You may have lots of models on your organization, so you want to inject it to the WinPE image as a built in driver?

How many models are you managing?