Adding drivers to your Windows XP CD

Prerequisites:

This tutorial references the following tutorials:

• Installing Windows in unattended mode,
• Integrating Microsoft applications into Windows XP,
• Adding Microsoft updates to the Windows XP installation.
  

Required knowledge:

• Driver recuperation software for currently installed drivers is useful.
• Long file name management from the command line.
  

A/ Introduction:

Windows XP has native drivers for a few hundred different types of peripheral devices allowing it to be operational from its first use. New products are released after Windows XP as well as new drivers updating previous versions.

This is seen from the following icons that can be seen in your device manager:

The examples will be the following:

ForceWare NVidia 53.03 WHQL (This example is also valid under versions 56.64 and 56.72 that have since been released). The method stays more or less identical for all peripherals.

B/ Modifying the OEM tree:

We will create a subdirectory called drivers\ in the $1\ folder so that the location of the drivers of all the peripherals for our installation are the same, with different sub-folder’s for each peripheral. A folder called textmode\ will be created for the RAID card to be installed in text mode (to use the second method, see chapter E):

C/ Recovering Drivers:

At the moment, the majority of the drivers offered by manufacturers are delivered in the form of executable files so that changes don’t have to be directly made in the device manager.

The driver files always have the .inf and .sys extensions, although other files can also be present (.hlp, .cat, .cpl, etc).