Overview - The following walkthrough will show the required steps to use the "E Series 6400 Driver Cab for Vista" in your existing Task Sequence.

Target Audience - IT professionals who have experience with the OSD component of ConfigMgr and have an existing Vista Task Sequence that they want to include Vista drivers for the Dell Latitude E6400.

1. Download Vista Cab - For this walkthrough, we will use the "D:\E Series Driver Cab" location for our Cab file.



2. Extract the Cab - If you have the Support Tools for Server 2003 installed, you can use the command line below to extract the cab. It will extract to a new folder "E6400" within the folder where the cab is located. Or you can use your favorite utility to unzip the cab.



Here is the folder structure of the extracted Cab file. For this walkthrough we will be importing the 32-bit Vista drivers located in the "x86" folder.



3. Import the E6400 Vista x86 Drivers into a new driver package - Launch the "Import New Drivers Wizard" by right-clicking on the "Drivers" node in the ConfigMgr Admin Console.

a. Enter the path to the x86 directory of the extracted cab files.



b. Select a category that will distingish these drivers. We will use "E6400 Vista x86" as the category. We will be applying a driver package which makes the categories less significant. However, a proper category is critical if you choose to "Auto Apply Drivers" (not covered in this walkthrough) at a later date, as you will not be successful without proper categories.



c. Create a new package for these drivers. We will use the name "E6400 Vista x86" as the name of the package and place them on our site server.



d. The new package is created and is selected to receive the Vista drivers being imported.


e. No drivers are added to boot packages at this time. We will do that later.


f. The Wizard is ready to import the drivers.



g. The drivers were imported successfully.



Here is the folder structure of the package that was created by the Wizard.



4. Send the new package to your DP's...TWICE! Select the DP's to receive the driver package. After they have received the package, update the DP's so that version 2 of the package is available. Version 2 of driver packages is required or you will get an error in your task sequence. Hopefully, this is being addressed in SP2 of ConfigMgr.



5. Add the imported Vista NIC driver to your boot image. Windows PE 2.0 (which is based on Vista) supports many network drivers, but for some newer models, you may need to add the NIC driver. Click on the Drivers tab (we filtered by our category "E6400" to make the driver easier to find), right-click on the desired NIC driver and add it to your desired boot image. Make sure to update distribution points for your boot media, followed by updating any bootable media that already exists (e.g., bootable CD or Bootable USB).




5. Create "Apply Driver Package" task sequence item to install the driver package and Mass Storage drivers

a. Create an "Apply Driver Package" item to you task sequence from the "Add" menu. In the "Properties Tab" on the right, name the task sequence item and select the driver package that you just created.

b. Currently, there are no additional mass storage drivers required when deploying Windows Vista to supported Dell hardware. If you are installing Windows XP, refer to the document specific for XP.



c. Add WMI queries to the driver task sequence item to limit it to only E6400 systems. On the "Options" tab, select "Add Condition" and choose "Query WMI".



d. In the query box, add the following select statement

Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem where Model like 'Latitude E6400%'



Here is the completed query condition for the task sequence item.



6. Test and Deploy You have now added driver support for the E6400 to your Vista task sequence and are ready to test and deploy.