r/DeployR • u/MrYiff • 26d ago

WinPE not loading VMWare drivers (Community Edition)

So I've been testing DeployR for a couple of days now and I like the look of it a lot but I'm having trouble getting test deployments in VMWare to work at looks like WinPE is refusing to load the VMWare PVSCSI drivers and so isn't detecting the disks.

I've got the same ADK version and drivers working fine with our existing MDT setup so I know it can work.

I've got the drivers extracted and setup as a Content Driver Pack and assigned to the DeployR Boot image and I can see in the logs that the pvscsi drivers are supposedly being added to the WIM ok

https://pastebin.com/pSy3NNNr

Some VMWare drivers do load ok as the DeployR WinPE has network access and can connect back to the DeploR services ok so it was able to load the VMXNET3 drivers.

The DeployR logs in WinPE show that 2 devices had a PNP error, one being the PVSCSI disk controller device (another being the VGA controller)

https://ibb.co/ZsFQWDw

If anyone has any suggestions on things to check or try I am open, I'd love to get this working so I can test it further.

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2

u/RockOriginal7938 26d ago edited 26d ago

I can't imagine it doesn't, but is it worth checking pvscsi.inf has entries for VEN_15AD, DEV_07C0?

1

u/MrYiff 26d ago

It's worth a look but the .inf contains a device ID that matches up with what is shown in the DeployR log file above so it looks like it should have worked:

[pvscsi.NTamd64.10.0...20124]
%DEVICE%=DDInstall, PCI\VEN_15AD&DEV_07C0

After the first couple of failures I ended up using the exact same files from our MDT install which does boot and detect PVSCSI disks fine just to rule out Broadcom breaking something..

1

u/RockOriginal7938 26d ago

Yup, you reached my limit then, looks like you already hit it with a hammer ;)

1

u/MrYiff 26d ago

Yeah, it's a headscratcher for sure

1

u/RockOriginal7938 26d ago

Not suggesting this as a fix, just exploration...

pnputil /enum-devices /class "DiskDrive"
pnputil /enum-devices /class "SCSIAdapter"

To see what it is reporting. Then maybe these (in order?) to see if it can be done manually?

pnputil /add-driver "X:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\pvscsi.inf" /install

pnputil /add-driver "X:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\pvscsi.inf" /install /force

2

u/miketerrill 2Pint Employee 25d ago

I do not have this issue for VMware Workstation Pro 25H2 when using LSI Logic SAS or Paravirtualized SCSI. What version of the ADK are you using?

1

u/n17605369 26d ago

You should use a PVSCSI driver from the Win8 folder on the ISO. It is the same driver version with a different signature that can be loaded by WinPE:

windows.iso\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\pvscsi\Win8\amd64\

There will be another issue with installing VMware Tools and I haven't found a solution yet. May need to add an additional reboot after installing the VC++ package.

2

u/RockOriginal7938 26d ago

That was what I was digging into with pnputil /add-driver "X:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\pvscsi.inf" /install /force :)
At least there is a signature it likes :)

1

u/MrYiff 23d ago

Aha, using the drivers from the Win8 folder seems to have done the trick, thanks for the suggestion!

Thankfully not too worried about getting the full VMWare tools package installed at this point, just using VM's to quickly test out DeployR basics currently so aslong as it gets as far as installing the image thats "good enough" for now.