Chris, you seem to have some experience with this, can you help?

I have a PE build for a bootable USB drive. It was built using server 2003 and PE 2005. I run the following command to create the base build:

MKIMG.CMD D:\WINPE2005\W2K3CD D:\WINPE2005\Builds\HDD /WMI /PNP /NOWF

I copy a bunch of junk to the D:\WINPE2005\Builds\HDD folder (NIC drivers and other tools and stuff), but modified the WINPEOEM.SIF to look like this:

[Version]
signature="$Windows NT$"

[OEMDriverParams]
OemDriverRoot= "DRIVERS\Additional_OEM"
OemDriverDirs= Dell5iR, IASTOR

I copied the drivers to Minint\system32\DRIVERS\Additional_OEM\Dell5iR and Minint\system32\DRIVERS\Additional_OEM\IASTOR respectively.

When I boot and hit F6 to load drivers, it says it sees the Intel 82801GBM SATA AHCI driver, but not the Dell SAS driver. If i copy the contents of the Dell5iR folder to a floppy and manually load the drivers, it loads just fine and I see my hard disks under PE. If I don't I only see my USB drive.

I'm a pretty intelligent guy and don't think I've lost it yet - what could the problem be? I missing something, and hope it just me having a junior senior moment...

Any help is appreciated...

Mahalo,
-DaG

Using WinPE 2005 (based on Win2003) and adding support for mass storage devices (SATA/RAID/SCSI) spells TXTSETUP.SIF. There is a ton of info on how to edit the TXTSETUP.SIF file, and how to extract the relevant information from the OEM suppliers .inf files on the msfn.org forum. Just search for TXTSETUP.SIF and u will be fine...
It requires u to do alot of reading but it is worth it.... again, this is much easier to handle with WinPE 2.0 and Vista but that is another story!

Before you do all that, check the [defaults] section of the txtsetup.oem be sure it is set to load (as default) the driver for your particular hardware. WinPE will ONLY load what is under that [default] section.