[wdd1040]

Hello, I'm sure everyone here is tired of hearing about people with driver related issues on WinPE.... But, here's another.


I'm building a new deployment infrastructure to deploy Windows XP SP2 via WDS pxe-booting lite-touch wim images created via BDD2007.

I specifically am having issues with PE initializing the RealTek 8139 NIC on Panasonic T2's and Rioux COWs (Healthcare...). These devices have the standard PNP IDs (PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8139... etc). However, I am NOT having an issue with the Panasonic T5 (same NIC, same PNP ID including SubSys).

I have attempted to roll in the newest driver from Realtek's site (663 and the vista one) via the Out-Of-Box drivers and the devices still attempt to initialize with the built in netrtl32.inf built into winPE. I have attempted to manually load the INF's via drvload and attempted to push them into the image with peimg /inf. None of these have helped.

I have also attempted to remove the built in INF and rebuilt the PE image manually. This did not help either.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to what else I can attempt to get this oddity working?





EDIT:
I have removed the netrtl32.inf from the winpe.wim from AIK and am now able to get BDD to build the Lite-Touch WIM image with the driver I specify in OOB drivers correctly. PE attempts to load them and now I'm getting different errors. So... Back to trying different vista related drivers until I can find one that will work correctly I guess.


Has anyone else had any trouble with Realtek 8139 NICs and PE2.0? If not, what driver are you using, or are you using built in?

This post has been edited by wdd1040: 19 April 2007 - 04:07 PM

[Jazkal]

if you run a devcon scan (inside of WinPE), does the problem nic show up in the list?

devcon.exe find pci*

You may have to add devcon to your build.

This post has been edited by Jazkal: 20 April 2007 - 06:53 AM

[wdd1040]

Jazkal, on Apr 20 2007, 08:53 AM, said:

if you run a devcon scan (inside of WinPE), does the problem nic show up in the list?

devcon.exe find pci*

You may have to add devcon to your build.

Yup. I've added devcon to my WIM image and ran it on all machines and am able to get the PNP IDs of the problem NICs from within there.

To add to the weirdness, using the newest driver and isolated so I can make sure it is being applied for these PNP IDs, on the Panasonic T5 it all works. On the T2, it doesn't pull IP, netcfg doesn't show device, and wpeinit.log shows that the inf failed to apply with status 0xe000020d. On the COW (basically an ASUS laptop) it pulls an IP and I have proper network connections, but wpeinit fails on litetouch.wsf with the exit code of 0x00000046.

So I'm stuck hardcore here. I'm going to continue trying other drivers, but I'm starting to lose hope and look for the company to purchase USB NICs for depoyment of these devices.

[wdd1040]

Just FYI for future searchers...


The common fact for all devices I was having trouble with was 256 meg of RAM and shared video memory. This caused the driver to not be able to allocate the proper memory or something similar and bombed.

Solution was to upgrade to more than 256 meg of memory.


(However, since our devices do not provide us easy methods of upgrading memory cheaply in the field... I am usuing WDS to blast down a fully unattended and scripted sysprep-based minimal windows installation to kick off the BDD scripts to run builds with the Apply PE and smsboot /target:PE task sequences removed.) Takes a bit longer, but allows us to leverage BDD for antiquated/legacy devices with the same framework as newly deployed devices.

Hope this helps someone else in the future.