Installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on a notebook and getting all those required drivers.
If you are like me, you use Windows Server 2008 R2 as your standard desktop/notebook OS. If you have installed Windows Server 2008 R2 on your notebook, you might notice that you ended up with a series of yellow bangs for missing device drivers. I found a workaround to get those drivers without have to manually go find them all from Windows Catalog. Try this….
1) Install Windows Server 2008 R2 on your notebook (I am using a Lenovo T61P), but leave about 20GB of free space available.
2) Install all the roles and features on your machine….here is what I have
- Hyper-V role
- Desktop Experience feature
- Wireless LAN
- Windows Server Backup
3) Run Windows update to get any driver updates….you will end up with multiple missing device drivers in Device Manager.
4) On that additional 20 GB partition, install Windows 7 x64 Enterprise or Ultimate
5) Run Windows update on the Windows 7 installation until all yellow bangs are resolved (this might take a couple of reboots)
6) Now reboot into the Windows Server 2008 R2 installation, open Device Manager
7) For each yellow bang, right click it and say Update Driver Software, when you get the dialog, select Browse my computer for driver software
8) In the dropdown box at the top of the screen, browse to the drive that has Windows 7 installed and go to Drive:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository, Click Next
9) The new driver should be found and automatically installed.
10) Repeat for all other drivers.
When you are done, you should have Windows 7 x64 drivers installed (except for the Bluetooth driver probably)
Hope that helps you fellow Windows Server 2008 R2 users….
