MDT 2010 Driver Injection Slowness

After upgrading from MDT 2008 to 2010, I recently experienced an issue with MDT / WinPE 3.0 that was simply a driver issue. The initial symptom reported to me was: Driver detection / copying (ZTIDrivers.wsf) is taking a long time in WinPE on a Lenovo T60. The build completed, but hung on the driver injection step for about an hour.

To start diagnosing, I booted WinPE 3.0 off of USB flash drive (UFD) on a Lenovo T60, brought up a command prompt (press F8) and tried to browse the disk (just by typing “c:”) I got: “The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted.” Upon issuing “format fs=ntfs quick” to diskpart, I received: “DiskPart has encountered an error: The parameter is incorrect. See the System Event Log for more information.” Running “ipconfig” yielded normal results, and I was also able to mount network shares, and browse them without any issue.

Note: I typically use a UFD because they boot significantly faster than off of optical media. 🙂

After posting on the MDT-OSD discussion list on MyITforum, I discovered that I may not have the correct drivers in my boot image. Most other people have reported that they haven’t had to inject any drivers, and I figured that the Vista drivers I had in my old WinPE 2.x boot images should have worked alright. As it turns out however, the Intel NIC was using a built-in driver from Microsoft according to wpeinit.log, and there was no mass storage driver being loaded according to the output from “devcon driverfiles *“.

Resolution

So, simply updating the mass storage and NIC drivers resolved the issue(s). The network drivers can be found here: http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-006120.htm. The storage drivers can be found here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17882&lang=eng.

Deployment Workbench: Windows Imaging Error

I just installed the Windows AIK for Windows7, and MDT 2010 on my 64-bit Windows 7 Release Candidate system, and attempted to open the Deployment Workbench. It opened just fine, but when I selected the Deployment Shares node in the snap-in, I got this error: “The file C:\Windows\system32\wimgapi.dll(version 6.1.7100.0 (winmain_win7rc.090421-1700)) is older than the installed Windows Automated Installation Kit (version 6.1.7600.16385).  Please remove the C:\Windows\system32\wimgapi.dll file so the proper one is used.”

Windows Imaging Error

I am unable to remove the file, or replace it with the newer AIK one, due to a lock on the file (my guess would be that it’s Windows System File Checker).

Most likely, the solution (or at least it might help) would probably be to upgrade to Windows 7 RTM, but I’ve been putting that off for so long, what’s a couple more weeks? 🙂 I just wanted to document this error / scenario in case anyone else comes across it.