Hello, I have a question about Auto Apply Drivers and Driver Packages. The SCCM documentation states the following: The Auto Apply Drivers task sequence action performs the following steps: Scans the hardware and finds the Plug-n-Play IDs for all devices present on the system. Sends the list of devices and their Plug-n-Play IDs to the management point. The management point returns a list of compatible drivers from the driver catalog for each device. The management point considers all drivers regardless of what driver package they might be in. Only drivers tagged with the specified driver category and drivers that are not marked as disabled are considered. For each device, the client picks the best driver that is appropriate for the operating system on which it is being deployed and that is on an accessible distribution point. The selected driver or drivers are downloaded from a distribution point and staged on the target operating system. For image-based installations, the drivers are placed into the newly deployed operating system image and Windows is configured with where to find the drivers on any Plug-n-Play scan. On Vista and later, the drivers are placed into the operating system driver store. For setup-based installations, Windows Setup is configured with where to find the drivers. When the Setup Windows and ConfigMgr task sequence action runs and Windows initially boots, it will find the drivers staged by this action. My question is about the relationship to this action, the Driver catalog in SCCM and Driver Packages. Will Auto Apply Drivers work without adding the drivers to any package? If not, and it requires drivers to be added to packages and then distributed to DPs, how does Auto Apply Drivers determine what packages to use? Does it download the entire Driver Package even if only requires one or two drivers from that package? As an example, what would happen if all drivers were imported into a single giant driver package which was distributed to the DPs. At the Auto Apply Drivers step, would it download the entire driver package or would it somehow only download the required drivers from this package? This line interestes me: "The selected driver or drivers are downloaded from a distribution point and staged on the target operating system." It seems to imply that there is some intelligence to how ConfigMgr selectively downloads drivers from the distribution point and essentially what I'm wondering is whether this means it only downloads the necessary driver files (for instance, if using a single "master" driver package containing all drivers, would it only download the 30MB worth of drivers required for a particular model rather than the entire 1GB of drivers contained the package) or if it will download the whole driver package and then sift through that after it's been downloaded. Thanks for any insight provided!

Hi, First of all, ConfigMgr will never know to download drivers from the internet... You are require to manually import the required drivers for your machine and assign catalog for the drivers. Next, you will require to create a package and add the drivers imported into the package. Lastly, update the DP. Here are some links to help you understand more: http://scug.be/blogs/sccm/archive/2009/02/27/sccm-2007-best-practice-importing-drivers-part-1-creating-a-driver-package.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2008/02/15/driver-management-part-1-configuration-manager.aspx Regards, Hau

Thanks for the reply. However, I'm not asking whether ConfigMgr will download drivers from the internet. I do understand how to create driver packages and import drivers into the ConfigMgr driver catalog. What I'm really curious about is how the Auto Apply Drivers step actually determines what drivers to download from the existing Driver Packages staged on the DPs in the environment. Essentially I'm wondering if this step will always download the entire Driver Package or if it selectively downloads only the required driver files from a Driver Package. Thanks.

I think I found the answer here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrosd/thread/4164e613-8c04-4070-8274-2f79b7f86be5 "Note that to use a driver, the client does not have to download the entire package, it will simply download the files for the specific drivers that match the PNP detection." Thanks.