Introducing ThinkPad Driver Packs for SCCM...

[parkerjnc]

Unfortunately, this offering will not include products prior to our Chief River platforms.  For those, I would recommend using Update Retriever's Export feature to get just the hardware drivers into an extracted form so they can be imported into SCCM/MDT.

[rtlinux]

Well that sucks.  At least we have something.

Thanks for the update.

[coylec5]

The T430 package says to install the Graphics driver and reboot before installing the Monitor file.  How do you do this in a driver package in SCCM?

[parkerjnc]

Actually I believe you can avoid that by doing two things.  I use MDT which gives me the ability to create a selection profile which I can target in the Inject Drivers task of the PreInstall section of the task sequence.  I define the selection profile by selecting the folder that has the drivers for the specific system I want to deploy.  When I target this selection profile in the Inject Drivers task I can specify that I want all of the drivers from the selection profile to be installed.  This is useful for including drivers for external devices which may not be attached at the time of deployment.

The second thing to do is to edit your unattend.xml file by going to the OS Info tab for your task sequence properties.  Click the Edit Unattend.xml button and the System Image Manager will load.  Expand the "7 oobeSystem" category then expand the "...Shell-Setup_neutral" category.  Then right-click on the "Display" item and delete it.  This item by default will set the screen resolution to 1024 x 768.  By removing it, the "recommended" resolution for the target device will be taken instead.

[kingskawn]

I've been waiting for this since Dell already had their first sccm packages. Useful because we received new M82, T530 and X230's so I can use the packs

For now I am using the thininstaller method with a server that has the the update retriever and I can make 1 big (1gb) folder with all lenovo (useful) tools and some drivers that couldn't be installed with the native sccm driver method. As for now this is the most complete method I know of.

I also copy an extracted thininstaller folder onto the computers and when it's needed I can trigger the lenovo updates to those machines.

But still, it's great news!

[domthevagabond]

So if I have 50 models I that aren't listed here I'm stuck with the Update Retriever for now? I'm glad to see the new way of doing things however I have to say please hurry up and do this for all your models.  Manually extracting all the .exe's for all of these models is going to cost us a ton of man hours to accomplish.

[rtlinux]

My understanding is that nothing old will be added.  You may want to get extracting.  I had already started building my driver structure based on MDT drivers so hopefully it won't hurt too much

[domthevagabond]

Roger that! Thanks for the reply.

[atmcnelis]

I too was upset that old models are not available.

I used the script provided on this page for repositiory I already have.

http://richardyoung.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/getting-lenovo-drivers-into-sccm-the-easy-way/

You chose model type you want extracted into SCCM packageble drivers and point to your respository.

It unpacks them by model based on the XML file.

Works like a charm

[rtlinux]

Very cool indeed. I took it one step further.
ModelType = InputBox ("Enter Machine Type (T430)")
that way you don't have to modify the script everytime. I also removed the echos as it was too busy. the only downside is all the UAC prompting I get on our systems. I have recently started exporting from update retriever as that looks like it works well if not better as I can tailor what I export.