Add all possible drive controller drivers in WinPE by default
Hello.
Would it be possible to add by default all possible and existing drivers of disk controllers, or well most of them, in the WinPE and MVP Assistant versions of Acronis bootable media?
The reason is that on some computers, the drives are not recognized, and I had to add manually the drivers of a Dell Inspiron so that the drive was recognized. I figured out how to do it and it works, but it is a very heavy process as I had to go find out the driver on the computer, and create a specific Acronis ISO bootable media with this driver included. This is quite frightening when we first create the bootable media and don't see the drive at all appearing. Also it would be much more practical if we could simply use an Acronis bootable media that we know it works on all computers, without having to add manually new drivers to it. Simply create it, connect it to the computer and boot on it. I think it should be an aim to reach, as it would be much more attractive for people to use it.
Of course this could add hundred of drivers, but I think all drive controllers and drives drivers (HDD, SSD, and HP, Dell, IBM, Acer, Lenovo, etc.. drive controllers) should be included, as we know of, that Microsoft provides, in an easy way. Or else, that we could download a zip file that has all of them and we can add during the creating of the bootable media so we are sure it is safe drivers, without having to go on constructors websites and download all of them. This way the bootable media could be safely used on all computers without worrying that it would maybe not work, or we downloaded an infected driver, and avoiding the hassle to create a new bootable media each time we want to backup a new computer's file system.
Also, would it be possible to provide this bootable media in an already compiled ISO file that we could just download and run, instead of having to build one ourselves, which would make it much simpler to create it?
Thanks.
Oklamaho,
Let me guess here, the Dell machine in question uses the Intel RST VMD storage controller drivers so when you booted the media you created no storage device was visible correct?
For your information Windows PE includes a huge number of device drivers both generic and some device specific enabling a PE media to be fully functional with most hardware. The outlier to that at this time is the Intel VMD controller drivers. Beyond that specific driver I have not found that any other storage devices are not recognized using a WinPE media.
Both the Acronis Media Builder and the MVP Assistant Utility are capable of adding in the Intel VMD driver and at some point Windows will include support for this controller natively.
Now that you know this is the case all you need to do is check to see if the Intel VMD storage controller drivers are being used on a machine and if so make sure you include them in any WinPE/RE media used on that machine.
@Steve Smith: Thank you for this explanation, it clarifies why it is this way.
@Enchantech: Yes exactly, the computer uses an Intel RST VMD storage controller, and the behaviour is exactly the one you describe. Ok, very good to know that we can add this driver in the WinPE version. If you could add it by default in the Linux version it would still be very helpful.
Thank you
Unfortunately the Linux version of Acronis boot media uses a BusyBox core and therefore device drivers are reliant on the developers of that core for driver support. This is why Acronis has moved to using the WinPE/RE media as the default.
Hello. Thank you for this information, I understand.
Maybe a project to move to an Ubuntu based live DVD could be a good idea in this case, which would possibly lead to a non-licensed media which would be ready out of the box, as BusyBox is GPL anyways it seems.
Also the size is not so relevant nowadays with fast USB sticks we can have 2GB Live DVDs without any issue.
You could even create a new Ubuntu flavour or simply take an lightweight one and build on it.
Thanks for your nice support!