We're having problems getting our drivers to work. What can be done?
KNOWN ISSUE: DeployAnywhere with DS 7.1 does not always apply the drivers needed.
http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO79452
Below is a lot of information on the internal functionality of DeployAnywhere (DA) that may assist in either resolving, or at least understanding, the behavior of DeployAnywhere. Please use this information against what you're seeing to ensure you take proper action in adding drivers to DA.
Critical Drivers = NIC and Mass Storage Drivers. These are deemed critical because without them, the system is considered non-functional. Without Mass Storage, it may not boot. Without NIC, you may not be able to reach it and/or perform any updates to it, so these are deemed critical.
Non-Critical Drivers = Anything else, such as Video, Sound, etc. All of these drivers can be added after-the-fact through various methods so long as the system is bootable and accessible via Critical drivers.
When DA looks at drivers, it looks for a number of things, tries to find any / all matches possible, and then makes a ranked choice of what driver to use. Here are some important items to note about driver selection (highest rank wins):
DA Switches of note:
/Managed | This tells DA to output results to a "driver_list.txt" file. Note, output to this file can be extensive depending on the switches used. |
/Eval | Requires /Target. This tells DA not to actually re-target anything, but simply to look for missing drivers. It may be used with or without the /DDB switch. If used with /ddb, then it looks for drivers missing from the Drivers DB. If used without it, it looks for drivers mssing from the target OS. |
/Precheck | This tells DA to enumerate all devices that require drivers and check if those drivers are present in the database. NOTE: it does NOT check for drivers present in the target OS like the /eval switch does. /Precheck can also be used with a /ddb switch (which also would require a /target switch). It can also be used with /reportnoncriticaldevices for an expanded output of results. |
/ReportNonCriticalDevices | This will expand the output of DA to include non-critical devices to the logs. |