Missing Driver On WinPE While Trying To Restore With Bootable USB Drive

Situation

When trying to restore image-based backup via bootable USB drive, you may receive an error “A connection to the deployment share couldn’t not be made. The following networking device did not have a driver installed.” This may be a cause of network device driver absence or some failure during drivers import.

Solutions

Option #1

The easiest way to resolve issue is to burn new bootable USB drive and add a path to necessary drivers on the pre-burn configuration wizard.

You can do it from the PC you were backing up or from any other Windows PC.

Option #2

In case you are not able to burn new bootable USB drive, following procedure will help you to add drivers without third party tools.

Create temporary folder on your machine C:\Temp
Copy Boot.wim file from E:\SOURCES\BOOT.WIM (bootable USB) to C:\Temp
Copy drivers to C:\Temp\mydrivers

Create cloudre_mount folder

Mount the wim file

Dism /Mount-Image /ImageFile:"C:\Temp\Boot.wim" /index:1 /MountDir:"C:\Temp\cloudre_mount"

Add your driver yourDriverName.inf to cloudre_mount folder

Dism /Add-Driver /Image:"C:\Temp\cloudre_mount" /Driver:"C:\Temp\mydrivers\yourDriverName.inf"

Check, if the driver appeared in cloudre_mount folder (installed drivers should be listed)

Dism /Get-Drivers /Image:"C:\Temp\cloudre_mount"

Unmount image and save changes

Dism /Unmount-Wim /MountDir:C:\Temp\cloudre_mount /commit

And that’s it! This is how it should look in command line:

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