[REQ] Selecting drivers like driverpacks

Firstly, this is quite contrary to our main policy, to provide drivers for as much HW as possible.
The idea is to create a Universal Installation Disc, not one limited to a specific system or HW.

If you only want to include drivers for HW that's in your system, I'd recommend the opposite approach as stripping all the drivers you do not need will take considerably more efford than just including the ones you do need.
You could either use nLite to add specific drivers (just extract them and point in to the INF dir).
Or, you could create your own custom pack containing just the drivers you needed.
Of course, you'd have to keep those up-to-date yourself, then.

Utilities such as "Driver Genius" (not freeware, though checking for new drivers works even on trial) can help with that.
If you just want to create a pack of your current drivers, you can use Siginet's Driver Grabber. You can then pack them all in one archive for use with BASE.

As to a selection screen in BASE, I think this is quite a difficult act to achive.
It would need to list every single driver contained in the DriverPacks. Those would also need to be displayed in a manner that makes it easy to navigate (no use in having a loooong list of thousands of drivers in the BASE that totally messed up the GUI).
Also, you'd need a database file for these drivers that constantly gets updated with each release as some are added, others removed or renamed.
This would also mean that your proposed INI file becomes worthless after each update and you'd have to redo the selection each time.

I do not code BASE, but I'm sure this would be a major effort, all while the intended use is contrary to our main policy as described above.
May take a lot of work to convince Jeff to take on this task, IMO

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• If you like this project, please support it with your donation!      • Grab your HW info (HWIDs) here!     
• If you are a newbie, be sure to check out the DriverPacks tutorial!     • Here's how to create your own DP!

Thanks to both of you. You have each made excellent points , pro and con...

from the base side of things this would be cumbersome as the folder names and supported devices change...
this could be addressed - medium high difficulty
  base is blind to the contents of the packs - so we would need to pass pack folder device info to the base program and generate a HUGE list with checkboxes or whatever. and would require extracting and repacking the DriverPacks

most people use M2 and as such the packs are not extracted until the WinPE stage of setup...
this presents two options;
  modify the pack(s) in advance - extract, prune, repack and possibly have to modify the packs INI too...
  this might be scripted however we refer to above... medium high difficulty and very time consuming
  for each new pack that is modded.

  Modify the packs from presetup.cmd after extraction - a small script that deletes a list of folder names.
  this may also require the pack ini's to be edited (maybe not...) this is probably the easyest choice.
  the down side is the full packs are extracted and then pruned so there are some wasted resources. 

It is still early and i havent had a full cup of coffee yet... perhaps i have missed something

it seems to me the easy way to do this is for you to create a script that will be called from presetup
this script will delete a "list" of \D\x\x  folders from the target machine.

this script will need to be manually modified each time the team changes folder names. IE we would need a way to find the folder that contained the 3dfx driver folder to prune it. this would either take codeing and then adding additional INI entries or create new files that serve as an index for each pack. obviously this would not be backward compatable. this also has the down side of additional work for the DriverPacks team...

lets put this idea down as "under consideration, pending feedback"

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In this case, you might be interested in jaws1975's faster version of un7zip.exe.

Might save some time for you, best to see for yourself.

Also, if you use all of the 3rd party DriverPack, you may want to do away with some that you really don't need.
The printer packs aeach are very huge and take the greatest share of copying/extracting time on my systems it seems.
If you do not need them (they only support certain printers anyway, are no use for network printers and require all devices to be connected and switched on during installation) or value speed more than complete driver support, removing them from the 3rd party DriverPack sub-folder is a great idea.

You could always supply peripheral device drivers through a driver's only disc that you execute some point after setup - this is already possible with what BASE supplies so you wouldn't have to seek long for such a solution (please do use search on this forum, however ).

Coming up next - useful links:
• If you like this project, please support it with your donation!      • Grab your HW info (HWIDs) here!     
• If you are a newbie, be sure to check out the DriverPacks tutorial!     • Here's how to create your own DP!

Ah yes, it could work as follows:

First, you run HWID on all machines that you want drivers from included in the pruned packs.
Then, this stand-aslone app would use these different HWID files as a reference for which files to be kept from the packs.
It would then upack all of them (that will take some space, around 2GB I figure), look up INFs for matching HWIDs (don't we have such a tool already, BTW?), move the folders and sub-folders containing those INFs to a new DIR, repack that as a 3rd party DriverPack and provide it for BASE for slipstreaming.

IDK how to preserve Finisher compatibility this way, but maybe you could do without (3rd party DriverPack ususally do not provide support for the Finisher anyway so you wouldn't have it if you made it yourself, either, unless you were up for some extra work).

Problem's just, I wouldn't know how to code that idea into a binary

Coming up next - useful links:
• If you like this project, please support it with your donation!      • Grab your HW info (HWIDs) here!     
• If you are a newbie, be sure to check out the DriverPacks tutorial!     • Here's how to create your own DP!

Nope, that may be able to do that but I was talking about a Team-only programme (so you may not know it, was more a hindsight to Jeff ).

Still, if this tool can help with the idea, why not!

Coming up next - useful links:
• If you like this project, please support it with your donation!      • Grab your HW info (HWIDs) here!     
• If you are a newbie, be sure to check out the DriverPacks tutorial!     • Here's how to create your own DP!

hi
imho, KTD in method 2 is a waste of time.
it puts the present releases in INF/path, but it apparently does not have the capability of switching between ATI and NV installers, because we use exceptions and those poke 7zipped installers in some cases.
(NV don't, and ATI have them. When you swap an NV with a ATI the ATI 7z-sfx is not going to execute, because it was not ran in initial setup.)

We probably discussed KTD and DPinst.
SAD and warmsnow can take the latest DriverPacks releases and do a proper post setup minisetup.
You fire up SAD's dp.cmd (this ought to be more in the limelight) or warmsnow's and get a minisetup with the latest builds you put in the disc, AND SAD uses the exceptions..

fwiw, the super short M1 I made for myself moons ago supports all but the latest chipsets and setup is just as quick..

Last edited by Jaak (2008-08-22 10:22:56)

edited post. please reread.
and yes, PRESENT releases is a key word.

KTD will at best only offer older releases, (and I used to test KTD. It was not bad. Seeding had benefits, but it would fail on new hardware that had not been in DriverPacks or not been put in inf/path by the exception rules during setup.)

reverse logic.
A generic hwid is seeded. (and PnP WILL take a generic from a driver with a close match even if it does not list any super generic)
We should advise to not ever use KTD. Run SAD cmd instead.

make it easy to find SAD, give it a pleasing name
StandAloneDriver
UPDATE
Universal Professional Driver App Team effort.
(joke)

FLASH
Fast Live approved system heal

DoPUP
Do drive pack upgrade