Software tasks failing because windows 10 installing drivers in background

[amandaw33]

I'm testing deploying win10 1809, and in a lab situation we have dozen+ software packages that get installed after the OS in the image job.

I'm noticing random failures with exit code 1618 which seem to indicate another installation is going in, which appears to be win10 updating drivers on its own.  I've already tried unchecking "allow other tasks to run while running this task" for every task in the job, it didn't help.

Has anyone ran into this or have a creative solution short of disabling win10's ability to update drivers via GPO?  I am still trying to decide if we want win10 updating drivers, but it was something we were considering let windows do so machines went out with the latest drivers.

So far I've seen photoshop failing more often than not, and google earht as well with the 1618 error.

[cheldt]

We copy all needed drivers in WinPE an import them to Windows via Powershell / DISM

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/add-and-remove-drivers-to-an-offline-windows-image

Driver Updates from WU you disable in GPO

[chrismcevoy72]

We deliver most of our updates via WSUS, except drivers which come from MS directly.  We try to include most of these in the base image or inject in WinPE.  However, we also use a program called WUInstall (https://www.wuinstall.com/), which allows us to trigger updates via a separate task in the post-deploy job.  It can fetch drivers from WSUS or from MS or both, and it gives you a details output of those installed and allows you to controll reboots etc.  It's really useful for those drivers that keep getting missed or get installed at the wrong times.  You can even get it to install specific drivers/updates - all from the commandline.  So we usually run WUInstall before any software deploy tasks in the post-deploy job, so that we know they've been done before any software is installed.  It pretty low cost too.

Hope that helps.

[amandaw33]

Chris - this is interesting, thanks.  You've tested with win10?

[amandaw33]

@chris or anyone, can you give me more info on injecting drivers while in iPXE?

 

I've been using this method for driver deployment without issue on win7, and win10 was going better but still seeing some failures and wondering if I should give driver deployment while in PXE a try.

 

I found this old post talking about DISM, but guessing those DISM tools aren't there by default on iPXE because I haven't found them yet.