sábado, octubre 10, 2009

Windows PE network driver in VMware Fusion

I hope next time won't take so much time to post here again. I'll try to do short posts and more often.

At work we use all flavours of VMWare: Server, ESX, Fusion.

Also we have set up a WinPE system to install Windows XP, so we can perform a fresh new installation in a new machine completely unattended with the possibility of installing some extra corporate software and some other tools.

I tried to do the same with new virtual machines, but you need to load the network driver for the installation. For doing that you need to download the AMD lancenet driver here:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/V4.51.zip

unzip it, stick it in a pendrive, access a console from your WinPE installation and load the driver manually with:

loaddrv.exe netamd.inf

then you have loaded the network driver and you can start the installation.

This is the quickest solution. A more long-term solution would be to include that driver in the CD so you don't need to load it manually.