I’ve been messing around with WDS and WAIK on my VMware lab at home. The BOOT.WIM that MS provides does not have native support for the NIC driver required by the standard VMware VM NIC. When you boot up your boot image you see the following error which prevents you from doing anything:
WdsClient: An error occurred while starting networking: a matching network card driver was not found in this image. Please have your Administrator add the network driver for this machine to the Windows PE image on the Windows Deployment Services server.
I was doing a lot of mucking around last night with WAIK to find a solution. I was close (IMAGEX and PEIMG) but it looks like I missed out the piece about identifying and targetting the correct boot index. I think I found a solution today on the Microsoft website. I haven’t tested it yet.
This solution consists of two steps:
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Load a driver into your "failed" booted up boot image and test it.
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Import a driver into your existing boot image once you have verified that it works in step #1.