Pre installing drivers during imaging

Recently I was faced with a challenge of how to pre install drivers for our universal USB docking stations so that a freshly imaged machine can just be handed out to a user without having to go through a manual install of the drivers beforehand.

The way I accomplished this was to use a utility found in the WDK (Microsoft Windows Driver Kit) called DpInst.exe

Here is the documentation for it:

WDK Documentation

At a high level all you basically have to do is get the drivers together in a folder with the correct version of DpInst (x86 / x64), build an XML file (called DPInst.xml) and then run it with a few switches to have it install the drivers for you. Then when a standard domain user comes along and plugs in the hardware it will automatically install it without asking for admin rights!

All you then have to do is build a package and include it in your SCCM task sequence to fully automate this tedious process :)

Thanks