Adding drivers onto Windows 11 USB boot media

Hi, the last time I done a fresh install of Windows 11 was a bit of a pain, at the time I didn't realise I needed the RAID drivers for my laptop, and it didn't find the new drive (which wouldn't be so much an issue now as thats sorted)
Also, during installation, the USB media drive I created didn't have the WIFI drivers on, so setup was unable to download all updates and setup my account etc thats useful during installation.

I was looking into in future, if doing similar, can I put the drivers on the USB so they load.

I read an article saying this can be done by extracting the drivers to the 'Sources' folder on the USB boot media?

Will this work as intended, so that Windows would be able to load these during installation?

Thanks
James

james_uk said:

Hi, the last time I done a fresh install of Windows 11 was a bit of a pain, at the time I didn't realise I needed the RAID drivers for my laptop, and it didn't find the new drive (which wouldn't be so much an issue now as thats sorted)
Also, during installation, the USB media drive I created didn't have the WIFI drivers on, so setup was unable to download all updates and setup my account etc thats useful during installation.

I was looking into in future, if doing similar, can I put the drivers on the USB so they load.

I read an article saying this can be done by extracting the drivers to the 'Sources' folder on the USB boot media?

Will this work as intended, so that Windows would be able to load these during installation?

Thanks
James

Click to expand...

See this excellent tutorial.

A win 11 installation drive may have eleven Win 11 images (Home, Pro, education etc) under a compacted file named install.wim or install.esd that is on the \sources folder.
You can slipstream (add) drivers to the images you use so Windows will find them automatically during installation. You can use Windows Dism app to do it.
Another way is to make a folder on the win 11 USB installation drive and load with all drivers you will need and manually point where to look to install them after a clean install.

The IRST (Intel® Rapid Storage ) RAID driver you will need during installation. You can put it on the same folder with the other drivers but you will need to load during installation (you load when you are asked where you want to install Win 11).

As there is a new Win 11 version every year, I suggest you make a folder on the win 11 USB installation drive and load with all drivers you will need.
As you already have win 11 set, you can generate a copy of all drivers installed.

While the preferred method is to integrate your drivers into an offline image, it's possible to copy drivers to the USB drive. Normally you have to use an autounattend.xml to instruct Setup where to find the folder, but there's another way.
Limitations of $WinPeDriver$ when used in conjunction with other driver injection methods

1. Extract driver files to a local folder.
2. Create $WinpeDriver$ folder on the USB drive, and copy your files there.

If you search the C:\Windows\Panther\setupact.logs on an installed Windows, you can see Setup checking for the folders:




What's the catch? If this trick was that easy, why doesn't everyone follow it?

The drawback is $WinpeDriver$ driver content is copied to WinPE's RAM disk or X: drive. There's a fixed amount of shared "disk space", but if you only have a few drivers and they're relatively small, they can fit. Something like adding NVIDIA's bloated drivers would be out of the question. That's why the normal answer is to integrate drivers into the image, where there is no space limitation.

But you can use the USB folder in certain cases. The worse thing than can happen is it doesn't work.

In this informative video, i will guide you through the process of adding device drivers to your Windows installation. Join me as we explore step-by-step methods to seamlessly integrate drivers into your Windows setup, ensuring your hardware functions flawlessly.

And there is this tutorial here at Elevenforum.

I have a stick with the drivers that came with my computer. I just copy that over onto a Windows installation boot disk, into /drivers folder. I always need the network driver to get Internet, so it’s right there to add.

@james_uk,

You need to be aware that there are two different types of drivers that you can add to your Windows image. You can add all your standard drivers to your Windows image. The end result of doing this is that after Windows is done being installed, ALL the drivers for your system will already be installed. However, this will NOT help the scenario that you described where Windows setup does not see the drives in your system. This is because the driver needed by setup needs to be injected into the boot.wim file rather than into the main install.wim image.

Drivers that are necessary during setup or startup are typically termed "boot critical drivers" to differentiate them from your run of the mill drivers.

Once you know how to do this, it's easy, but a bit time consuming. As a result, I wrote a program that does this for me .

So, if this would be helpful to you, I can provide a couple of options to you:

1) I can provide a step-by-step guide so that you can do this manually.

2) I can provide the program to you.

Let me know if either option (or both) interest you.