Loading Preferred Driver in VistaPE External links Options

[Claus Valca]

Hi Guys (and Gals!),

Let me begin by saying how appreciative I am of everyone's hard work and efforts on the VistaPE project. It is really a great tool and the community has really contributed to its success.

I've started out building BartPE disks then quickly moved to VistaPE when Win PE 2.0 was released.

Right now I am still using the Vista PE 12 beta 3 build along with a SP1 WAIK kit. All works great.

Here's my issue and I'd like to see if anyone can give me some more avenues to try out to solve this nagging headache.

We have recently been deploying Dell Optiplex 745/755 (XP Pro) desktop systems. Great little machines. However, they ship with a "multimedia" USB hub keyboard and the systemboards contain no legacy PS2 ports. It's USB all the way.

If I build a plain-jane WAIK Win PE 2.0 boot disk, all the drivers load just fine and the USB keyboard works great.

If I build a plain-jane VistaPE boot disk, the keyboard doesn't work. Luckilly the USB mouse does and I was able to find in the devices tool that there was a USB HUB driver not loading.

Clever me used NirSoft's DriverView tool off a USB stick when booting with each system and was able to capture the drivers loaded under each boot disk. After some time of comparing them, it looks like the driver in question was a HID Keyboard driver.

I managed to extract that one as well as a few other USB drivers out of the WAIK boot.wim, then use MudCrab's most excellent AddDriver script to successfully "inject" them into the VistaPE build.

Despite this the keyboard driver still does not load. However, I know I must be on the right track as before the device manager under VistaPE listed the unknown device as a USB Hub driver. Now it lists it as a Dell USB Hub Keyboard. It just doesn't load the driver. Even if I attempt to do so from the "Install" or "Update" options in that tool.

So in a fit of frustration, I included a on-screen keyboard app on my VistaPE custom folder and I can type text into the VistaPE screen that way. Just kinda slow and frustrating and nothing I want to share with my technicians just yet.

I found the specific INF/SYS combo that I injected that does include the specific kbdhid.sys driver that is working and listed under the WAIK PE 2.0 disk but remains not loading in the VistaPE 2.0 disk. So it is listed and included, but it seems that VistaPE is not giving it preference or priority when it works it way through that INF file.

I might consider myself an intermediate skilled user of VistaPE, and looks like I need to do some research on how INF files work. I considered trying to rearrange the items in the INF file in question to bring the kbdhid.sys item to the top of the four or so ones listed, then re-inject.

So I am certain there are other Dell Optiplex 745/755 system administrators who use this tool, and maybe someone has gotten the USB keyboard hub driver to load? If so could they please share their technique? If it works under the WAIK 2.0 "pure" disk, I should be able to make it work under the VistaPE disk as well.

If not, does this learned community have any suggestions for forcing a specific driver to load? Or, heck, if I could just find a method to include the full WAIK install.wim driver package into the VistaPE.wim just to see if that would work. I love the reduced size of the VistaPE.wim file in comparison, but if it doesn't work (except for that on-screen keyboard workaround) it isn't much use at the moment.

I know there MUST be something very simple here that I'm missing with getting this stupid kbdhid.sys driver to load and execute under VistaPE. Unless I'm too focused on this and missing something else that is the root problem.

I would be very grateful for any advice.

--by the way...I've worked out a way (not quite up to building scripts myself just yet but I'm studying the great tutorial here I found by Nuno Brito) to "inject" the PGP Whole Drive Encryption drivers into the VistaPE disk. This lets you boot a PGP encrypted disk with VistaPE and then load the disk-encryption driver and then (if you have the passphrase) decrypt the contents on the fly. Really cool and helpful. Once I get past this issue, I'll drop my technique in here for others in the community who might have to use PGP.

Cheers!

--Claus V.