Adding drivers onto Windows 11 USB boot media

[JamesUK]

Hi, the last time I done a fresh install of Windows 11 was a bit of a pain, at the time I didn't realise I needed the RAID drivers for my laptop, and it didn't find the new drive (which wouldn't be so much an issue now as thats sorted)
Also, during installation, the USB media drive I created didn't have the WIFI drivers on, so setup was unable to download all updates and setup my account etc thats useful during installation.

I was looking into in future, if doing similar, can I put the drivers on the USB so they load.

I read an article saying this can be done by extracting the drivers to the 'Sources' folder on the USB boot media?

Will this work as intended, so that Windows would be able to load these during installation?

Thanks
James

 

[Murphy]

Depends how automated/in depth you want it to be. The simplest way is just to extract the drivers to a folder on the USB drive and during install it will allow you to add drivers by clicking on have disk and browsing to where you extracted the drivers.

Another option is to add them to the image before installing by mounting the .wim file and using something along the lines of Dism /Add-Driver /Image:"C:\mount\windows" /Driver:c:\drivers /Recurse

 

[Django x2]

Hi, the last time I done a fresh install of Windows 11 was a bit of a pain, at the time I didn't realise I needed the RAID drivers for my laptop, and it didn't find the new drive (which wouldn't be so much an issue now as thats sorted)
Also, during installation, the USB media drive I created didn't have the WIFI drivers on, so setup was unable to download all updates and setup my account etc thats useful during installation.

I was looking into in future, if doing similar, can I put the drivers on the USB so they load.

I read an article saying this can be done by extracting the drivers to the 'Sources' folder on the USB boot media?

Will this work as intended, so that Windows would be able to load these during installation?

Thanks
James

You didn't have RAID you had Dell RAID (assuming Dell laptop) because nvme drives could only work with Intel Rapid Storage set to on. If you'd set your device to ACHI mode in the BIOS, you wouldn't have needed drivers and there performance difference would have been negligible.