Episode 14 – MDT 2012: Out-of-box Driver Management

This is for a reader that emailed me requesting how Out-of-box drivers in MDT 2012 could be managed when you have multiple drivers in your MDT 2012 Workbench. To begin we need to know how the workflow of the drivers in MDT 2012 actually works.  The driver injection workflow is as follows, when a machine is booted over the network the PNPEnum.exe collects a hardware inventory of the devices in that machine so it could determine which driver(s) will need to be injected in the imaging process before the image is actually installed on the machine.

By default the inject driver step in the task sequence will query for driver matches in the “All Drivers” Selection Profile.

So by default, you could get away with dumping all of your drivers in to the Out-Of-Box Drivers node of MDT 2012 workbench, but you want to work smarter not harder you want to deploy your image with the correct drivers not dump everything in the node into the image. This could lead to corruption to the drivers in the target machine.

For best practice I won’t recommend doing the driver this way because it’s a horrible approach to driver management especially if you have multiple machines with different drivers. I would recommend to create a folder structure under the Out-of-Box Driver store to better manage how you add drivers to your MDT Workbench. I prefer to create a sub-folder for each Operating System, then each architecture type (x86 0r x64), then each hardware model. Please check out the video below for a visual view 🙂