0windows 8 logoAdding drivers to windows 10 boot image on WDS on Server 2012 R2

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I have enough PCs in the house that I set up a WDS serv­er to make it easi­er to rein­stall win­dows if any of them go wrong. They have a lot of dif­fer­ent hard­ware and so I needed to add some drivers to the boot image which is from a Win­dows 10 retail DVD. How­ever, I got an error when try­ing to add them because the ver­sion of DISM used by WDS on serv­er 2012 is older than the ver­sion required by Win­dows 10 images


The error I got was “the fol­low­ing driver pack­age could not be added to the image”

You can manu­ally add the drivers using a new­er ver­sion of DISM which is included with WAIK for Win­dows 10

How­ever, you can also force WDS on serv­er 2012 to use the new­er DISM…

  1. Install WAIK
  2. Change the prop­er­ties of the short­cut for “Win­dows Deploy­ment Ser­vices” so that the “start in” entry says “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deploy­ment Kit\Deployment Tools\amd64\DISM\”
  3. In System32 take own­er­ship, change per­mis­sions and then delete (or rename) DISM.exe and DISMapi.dll

Thanks to Dale Mahalko on the Tech­Net forums

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