Building support for NC7170 in to W2K RIS image

[Adrian Johnson_1]

Recently, I've hit problems with trying to build in support for HP's NC7170 Gigabit NIC card in to our W2K CD-ROM based (i.e. RISETUP) RIS images.

I’m following the usual process for building in OEM NIC card support, i.e.

1) Copying the drivers in to the relevant directories, as specified in the OemPnpDriversPath of the answer file.
2) Copying the drivers in to the I386 directory.
3) Deleting existing .PNF files.
4) Bouncing BINLSVC.

...but as soon as I place the drivers (i.e. the contents of softpaq cp005149.exe) in to the I386 directory, the install will fail during the textmode set up, with an error stating that "The file N1000nt5.sys is corrupted." Using a test build image I have tried a number of things, but always with the same result. Tests include:

1) Placing earlier versions of the drivers in the I386 directory.
2) Taking the files (.sys, .inf and .cat) from a server that has been successfully manually built using SmartStart and placing them in the I386 directory.
3) Extracting the N1000NT5.SYS from the N1000NT5.SY_ file.
4) Even modifying the driver.cab and drvindex.inf, to remove all reference to the N1000NT5.SYS natively included with W2K (N.B. this version does not support the NC7170).

Removing these drivers from the I386 directory altogether results in the, "The Operating System Image You Selected Does Not Contain the Necessary Drivers for Your Network Adapter" error being raised during the textmode setup instead, which is to be expected.

I'm not getting much joy on calls I have open with both HP and M$, so if anyone here has any advice, I'd be eternally grateful.