I have been doing a lot of work lately on deployments of Windows 7 (Yes, companies are jumping on board already since they sat on their hands during the Vista years).  Some of the new features of Windows Deployment Services in Server 2008 R2 are really nice, especially the driver package management.  However, it is somewhat limited in flexibility as the drivers can only be applied to deployed images based on a few very inflexible filters.  If there are some drivers that you want to apply directly to an image, you have to resort to the command line.  In my case, I was actually creating a WDS boot CD (which is not as easy as Microsoft’s directions) using the directions here: http://www.davidbolton.com/?p=24 .

The problem comes in with the Windows 7 Automate Installation Kit because some of the commands I was familiar with have been done away with.  This is not to say is is less feature packed, instead the peimg command has been rolled in with a few others under dism.  Here is how you can use dism even more powerfully than peimg.

As you can see, DISM has a number of options when it comes to making changes to images either in offline file-structure format or mounted (online) .wim files.  The option we want to focus on here is the /Add-driver switch.  The nice thing about DISM is that at any point in making a command, you can put a /? switch after what you have and it will tell you what further options you have at this point and even gives some examples.

You will notice that doing a /add-driver /driver:c:\whatever /recurse will search a given directory for drivers and add all of them, recursing through any sub directories.  This is useful for a situation where you have a driver installer that you unzipped instead of installing and you want to add all of the different drivers for different architectures or OS versions to an image.  The resulting DISM command then looks like this:

dism /image:f:\winpe /add-driver /driver:f:\drivers\LAN /recurse

That’s all there is to it!  Then you just follow how to commit the changes to the image you were working on.