Using Additional Hardware Drivers

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

If your hardware is not supported out of the box by our WindowsBMR system, you have the choice to load the required drivers manually or even embed them into the Rescue Image.

Download the missing drivers from the manufacturer or vendor web site. Choose a 64-bit version, and always prefer the Windows 8 or Windows 2012 version of the drivers. Older versions of the drivers could work too, if you cannot find more recent version.

Load Drivers from a USB Stick or a Floppy

Extract the drivers and associated files to a USB stick. Usually there are 3 files: *.inf, *.sys and *.cat like these:

26/08/2009  15:10            68,668 b57win32.cat
26/08/2009  15:10           181,388 b57win32.inf
26/08/2009  15:10           213,544 b57xp32.sys

At any time in the GUI you can open the menu item “Tools” in the “File” menu. A dialog box appears, where, in the tab “Load drivers”, you can click on the “Browse” button to locate the .ini file and then choose it and click “Open” to load the driver.

It is also possible to load the driver from the command line using the “drvload” command:

drvload filename.inf

To test if your network adapter or disk controller is working, use the commands ipconfig or diskpart as explained below.

Embedding Drivers into the Recovery Image

It is not possible to modify an ISO 9660 filesystem, but some free tools on the Internet can extract all data and rebuild a new ISO image including your changes. Ask Google for "modify" or "edit" "iso" "images" to find these tools. We have tried the free WinISO-5.3 with success.

You must copy your drivers into the WinBMRDrv directory at the root of the ISO image. This directory already exists and contains additional drivers. When looking for drivers, WindowsBMR does a recursive search in this directory, thus you can keep your drivers in separate directories. Remove the existing drivers if you think they conflict with your own drivers.

Test your Drivers

You can use the ipconfig and diskpart commands to see if your network adapter or your disk controller has been detected by your drivers.

Run "ipconfig" from any command prompt to display the list of all network adapters found on the host and their IP addresses.

diskpart can display the list of installed disk. Run the program from a command prompt and at the diskpart prompt type "list disk".