In Win2K, installing new drivers unattended is that simple—quite an improvement over NT 4.0 scripted installs. You don't even need to tell Win2K that the driver is a video driver: Although I named the directory extravideo, I could just as easily have given it any other name.
In a few years, you'll be installing Win2K on circa-2003 machines on which most of the hardware and drivers will be new. Consequently, you'll have a lot of new drivers to offer Setup—video drivers, SCSI drivers, sound drivers, USB device drivers, and so on—so your network distribution share will have more than one set of updated drivers. How can you offer more than one set of drivers to Win2K's Setup? You have two ways to do so.
First, you can put as many drivers as you like in one directory. To extend my example of the computer with the PixelPainter video board, let's suppose that the computer also has a SCSI board whose drivers aren't on the Win2K distribution CD-ROM. If the SCSI host adapter uses a pair of driver files called myscsi.sys and myscsi.inf, you can simply copy those two files into the \i386\$OEM$\extravideo directory and change nothing else. When Setup needs to find SCSI drivers, it will look in the extravideo directory.
But for a number of reasons, you might not want to put all your drivers into one folder. The folder's contents could become hard to keep track of after the number of driver files exceeds a few dozen. Or, a couple of pieces of hardware might have drivers with similar names—for example, two SCSI vendors might be uncreative and name their drivers scsi.sys. In either case, you can take the second approach and use more than one folder.
Creating as many driver folders as you like causes no problem. Just put all the folders into the \i386\$OEM$ directory. For example, you might put some drivers in a folder named \i386\$OEM$video, others in the \i386\$OEM$\scsi1 folder, and still others in the \i386$OEM$\scsi2 folder. Your OEMPnPDriversPath command would then be
OEMPnPDriversPath="video;scsi1;
scsi2"
Notice the syntax. You specify only the part of the directory below \i386$OEM$; a list such as \i386\$OEM$video; \i386\$OEM$\scsi1; \i386\$OEM$scsi1 won't work. You separate the directories with semicolons and enclose the entire list in quotes.
And That's Not All
Like NT 4.0, Win2K offers you a number of options for network-based system installs and uses an $OEM$ directory. But Win2K lets you do considerably more with $OEM$ than NT did. I'll show you some more new $OEM$ tricks in future columns.
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You have to setup MS-Net 3.0 to a drive using the same drive letter as the ramdrive later uses. So, it is possible, but it requires even more 'fiddling'. Good luck!
Sjaak Monasso April 11, 2002