Windows Disaster Recovery Driver Guide

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Retrospect leverages Microsoft’s WinPE environment for disaster recovery, this allows you to boot into a temporary OS off a CD/DVD or flash disk to help facilitate the restore process. This environment does include drivers that are initially available after installing Windows, but in some cases you will need to provide a driver for your storage controller or network interface card. This guide is to help determine what drivers you will need to load for your storage controller or network interface card.

Retrospect 15 and Higher

Retrospect 15.x and 16.x supports the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit version 10 which can be installed from the link below. WinPE is now an add-on and needs to be installed after installing the WADK.

To add drivers to your Disaster Recovery image you need to add the driver’s .inf file to C:\Program Files\Retrospect\Retrospect 16.x\drsupp\drivers folder before creating the DR image. The drivers that you want to use needs to be for platform architecture type you chose when creating the image. If you chose the 64bit environment, you would need to use 64bit drivers. When booting from the DR image if the device is a plug and play device, Windows will automatically load the driver. For Network and Storage controller drivers they will not be loaded automatically, the .inf file(s) will be located in X:\Windows\INF and named OEM*.inf (i.e. OEM0.inf, OEM1.inf, OEM2.inf, etc.).

Retrospect 9 to 12

Retrospect 9.x can use WinPE 3.0/3.1 or WinPE 4.0 depending on what Windows kit is installed. Version 9 also allows you to create either a 32-bit or 64-bit environment based on what drivers are available for your hardware. The Windows Automated Installer Kit (WAIK) uses WinPE 3.0/3.1 and the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit 8.0 uses WinPE 4.0. If WAIK is installed you will need to provide a Windows 7 32/64-bit driver or a Windows 2008r2 driver based on the environment you chose when building the .iso file. If WADK 8.0 is installed you will need to provide a Windows 8 32/64-bit driver or a Windows 2012 driver.

Retrospect 8

Retrospect 8.x uses the WinPE 3.0/3.1 environment, which is based off of Windows 7 and only the 32-bit environment is available. You will need to provide a 32-bit Windows 7 driver when using a DR disc created by Retrospect 8.x. Windows 2008r2 is 64-bit only and we recommend using Retrospect 9 if the only driver available is for Windows 2008r2.

Retrospect 7

The Retrospect 7.7 DR disc uses WinPE 2.0, which is based off of Windows Vista and only the 32-bit environment is available. You will need to provide a 32-bit Vista/2008 driver for this environment.

Last Update: December 17, 2019