NOTE: Before you start, it is important to understand when working with WinPE 2.1 you need to be adding Vista/2k8 drivers. For WinPE 1.6 use XP/2k3 drivers. If you try to use the wrong driver framework with your version of WinPE you will have problems. That being said ...
Basic driver troubleshooting steps:
When PXE booting a NIC card that doesn't have drivers in your WinPE bootdisk you will see several DHCP retry messages. After some time, at the end of the DHCP retries you should be at a WinPE command prompt.
1. Open Regedit.exe
2. Do a search for your NIC. You can go by name but if you know the VendorID it is probably easier.
Ex.
Broadcom 14E4, Intel 8086, Yukon 11AB etc...
3. Generally you will find a result under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurentControlSet001\Enum
4. Once you have found your NIC card you should be able to pull the info for it from the key name or HardwareID.
Ex.
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_167B&SUBSYS_2808103C&REV_025.
Now you have some ammo to use in your Bootwiz. You can edit the boot disk and sort by 'DeviceID' (167b in example above).
With the Device ID known, you can then determine:
- Does the DeviceID exist in my bootdisk?
- Is more than one DeviceID added? If so, is it excluded? (see notes below about exclusions)
- Is it pulling from the BASE, STD, or CUSTOM?
- Is it the DeviceID using the driver file I expected it to?
Once you get through these steps you should generally know why a driver isn't working. At a very minimum you have a direction for troubleshooting further.
Clearing excluded drivers in Bootwiz editor:
If you are seeing several excluded drivers that will not clear even after you remove the red 'X' and rebuild the bootdisk, do this to clear the caching problem:
1. Open PXE configuration Utility
2. Highlight WinPE 2.1 > Click Edit
3. Choose User Supplied > Click Manual Boot Image > Click Cancel
** At this point the cache will clear **
4. Choose Boot Disk Creator > Click Edit Boot Image
5. Right click WinPE 2.1 and Edit Configuration > Click Next
Now once the drivers load everything should be reset and there will be no more exclusions.
6. Make sure auto-detect is selected then step through the rest of the wizard re-entering your authentication credentials and drive (re)mappings.
7. Complete the wizard to re-generate your PXE image
8. Save your settings in the PXE config utility to distribute the new PXE image to your PXE servers.
Now when WinPE loads, you should see all the extra oemN.inf files loading that were previously excluded.