Troubleshooting: Out-of-box driver deployment using WDS

Scenario: You are using Windows Deployment Services (WDS) to deploy Windows 7 together with an out-of-box driver needed by some hardware on the target computers. You have added the driver to the WDS store using the WDS console and the operating system installs without any problems.  But after you boot the target computer and log on and open Device Manager, you notice that the out-of-box driver was not installed. To troubleshoot you checked the setupapi.dev.log found at C:\windows\inf and there was an error saying “Error 0xe0000228: There are no compatible drivers for this device.”

Possible Solution: Make sure the out-of-box driver you added using the WDS console belongs to at least one driver group.  If OOB drivers in the WDS driver store are not added to a driver group, they will not be deployed to target computers.

Mitch Tulloch is a seven-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award and widely recognized expert on Windows administration, deployment and virtualization. For more tips by Mitch you can follow him on Twitter or friend him on Facebook.

About The Author

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Scroll to Top