MDT with no working USB system

MDT uses Windows PE to boot a PC and perform the first stages of an install. Windows PE is built from the latest edition in the Windows ADK, which is now at a version supporting Windows 10 1803. As such you would expect there to be a pretty stellar support out the box for well established and older hardware, but this isn’t always the case.

Recently I was working with some 8 year old PC’s that have an Intel P35 chipset in them, using the ICH9 southbridge. The MSI Neo P35 boards had 1 BIOS update before the boards were promptly forgotten by MSI. USB options in the BIOS include turning the controller on and off as well as enabling/disabling Legacy support – that’s it.

When booting the PC, the keyboard and mouse work fine in the BIOS as well as on the option ROM screens to select network boot, F12 to enter MDT etc. The problem came in that as soon as I got into MDT, the keyboard and mouse vanished. Unplugging and re-plugging the devices didn’t help, nor did switching ports. Unfortunately I no longer have any PS/2 port based mice or keyboards, so I was stuck and unable to continue the MDT task sequence. Disabling USB Legacy support simply meant that the keyboard stopped working for the option ROM and network booting screen, so I couldn’t even enter MDT in the first place.

There wasn’t a huge amount of info on the net, but it seemed to be related to the drivers in use for the USB controller. I tried deleting the driver in MDT and then rebuilding the boot image, but my first attempt had no luck – keyboard and mouse still vanished once in MDT. I then built a “clean” boot image with no additional drivers in it bar what is built into Windows PE and this time I had mouse and keyboard working right away. Yay, problem solved I thought.

Wrong. Once Windows was installed, my mouse and keyboard refused to work and I was unable to interact with Windows at all. Changing keyboards and ports did nothing. Eventually I used Remote Desktop to connect to the PC and looked at Device Manager. Sure enough, there were yellow bangs on most of the USB controller entries, so the actual ICH9 controller wasn’t fully installed by the drivers in Windows 10.

I found a zip on Intel’s site for their chipset/INF installer, dated early 2010’s, but the actual INF driver for the ICH9 USB controller dates from 2008. These installed perfectly on Windows 10 and enabled me to use the PC.

My next attempt saw me take these INF files and add them to MDT’s driver pool, then build new boot images using these drivers. Lo and behold, not only did Windows PE behave on boot, the finished Windows 10 install worked correctly as well.

What puzzles me is that with my first attempt, I already had ICH9 drivers in the boot image, but these dated from 2013. There must have been some sort of bug in these drivers during use in Windows PE, so I simply reverted to the older 2008 ICH9 USB drivers – it’s only 2 files in total that need to injected.

In the end, older hardware is going to have odd little quirks like this that eat up time and cause puzzlement while you try and figure out what the problem is. Of course, newer hardware isn’t exempt either – Intel’s I219-V network card has a bug that prevents PXE booting and not all motherboard manufacturers released UEFI updates to fix this issue as they probably didn’t deem it worth their time to do so.