Question : Include Driverpack drivers to RIS WIN XP SP2 image

Hello, we have a Dell environment and have attempted to include RIS as a time saver when it comes to installing machines which proved simple for our server environment but including the clients (which would be the real time saver) has proved to be much more difficult than expected.
The client machines are mostly from Dell in many different models and first it proved to be quite hard just to pass the text installation part, simply adding the Dell XP OEM image to the RISserver resulted in many error messages at client installation setup where the Dell altered TXTSETUP.SIF file referred to many offensive files.

The solution turned out to be to replace this Dell OEM specific TXTSETUP.SIF with a generic one from a regular Windows XP CD and then the text installation part worked fine. (It was however quite remarkable that trying to use the  regular XP image for RIS resulted in different text installation problems so the only way I have passed the text installation part have been to add a generic TXTSETUP.SIF to a RIS-image generated from DELL OEM XP.)

The next step was however to recognize other PnP-drivers from the GUI part and in order to accomplish I did the following:

1. Creating a "$OEM$\$1\Drivers" folder structure under  the RIS\Setup\English\Images\win_xp_sp2 image folder and adding some Dell specific drivers to it.
2. Adding following lines to the image \templates\RISTNDRD.SIF file:

[Unattended]
    UnattendMode=ProvideDefault
    OemPreinstall=Yes
    emPnPDriversPath = "Drivers"
    DriverSigningPolicy = Ignore
    TargetPath=\WINDOWS
    FileSystem=LeaveAlone
    NtUpgrade=No
    OverwriteOemFilesOnUpgrade=No

This worked fine with simple device drivers of *.inf and *.sys type residing in a flat folder but when I added more complex drivers (i e graphics) that encompassed subfolders as well the Windows installation part could not locate them.
There are also so many different client drivers so getting them all would be incredibly time consuming so my next idea was to include all drivers from the DriverPack (http://driverpacks.net/ ) with the DriverPack utility and Autoimage ( http://www.doitrightconsulting.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3 )

Using these utilities I integrated all driverpacks (Method 1) directly to the XP SP2 image residing at the RIS server and the end result was that corresponding Driverpack .ini-files were created under $oem$\1$ including many driver subfolders below.

I assumed that referring to the path emPnPDriversPath = "Drivers" would be sufficient and that the windows GUI installation part would traverse the subfolders to find the needed drivers but it turned out that a complete RIS installation now did not discover any driver whatsoever (not even the NIC-drivers) so clearly I am doing something wrong.

Is it possible that the emPnPDriversPath = "Drivers" parameter requires a explicit path for every folder and is not satisfied with just a path to the *.ini files in question?
This sounds indeed strange since the DriverPack utility should indeed "integrate" all drivers to the installation media and it does not make any sense that you should need to add an explicit path to every sub folder as there are several hundreds of them.

I have gotten the impression that integrating Driverpacks to RIS images with the aid of Driverbase and Autoimage is pretty much standard procedure when it comes to unattended installations so what am I doing wrong?

Any help to troubleshoot this issue is greatly appreciated as this project so far has been quite time consuming instead of the time saver it was supposed to be.

Answer : Include Driverpack drivers to RIS WIN XP SP2 image

Yes, this is an inherent flaw in Windows XP.  Windows Vista and beyond will enumerate all folders under the one you specify, so if you said "C:\drivers" and had subfolders underneath, Vista would look in all folders.

There are utilties to build the path automatically:

http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t26760.html

My path is around 660 characters and I did it by hand.