Dell Latitude XX80 drivers won’t import into MDT Litetouch

TL;DR; Don’t import the Dell ControlVault driver into MDT Litetouch 8443 or older. It will crash the driver import.

Case of the mysterious…

David Landry posted a good question on the MDTOSD forum on http://myITForum.com”

Just curious what everyone / anyone has done with the Dell driver problem they have with the new Latitude XX80 series laptops. I imported their CAB files into MDT and got error.

It took me a while to narrow down the problem, but I was able to get a stack trace of the error:

System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException: Length cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: length ---> System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Length cannot be less than zero.
Parameter name: length
 at System.String.Substring(Int32 startIndex, Int32 length)
 at Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn.InfInfo.CheckDriverFile(String filePath)
 at Microsoft.BDD.PSSnapIn.InfInfo..ctor(String infPath)
...

Looks like CheckDriverFile() function was trying to get a Substring() but the 2nd argument for Length was zero. Not much of a substring…

I opened my trusty Ilspy.exe and revealed:

ilspy

Some further analysis reveals that the Dell ControlVault driver was the culprit, and I was able to dig down and find the file “Current_Version”. Current_Version has no File Extension, so it would cause the CheckDriverFIle() function to fail.

[cv_fw_copy]
bcmLynx_1.otp ;CV Firmware binaries
bcmLynx_7.otp
clearscd.bin
current_version
sbiLynxA0_1.otp
[...]

There is nothing technically wrong with the Dell Driver here, this is valid file. Additionally, this is the first time I have come across this bug in MDT, in the past 4 or so years this code has been active. It’s just an interoperability bug.

I have sent e-mail to both Microsoft and Dell. I’m hoping to qualify for the new Microsoft Bug Bounty program, but I’m not holding my breath. ;^)

3 thoughts on “Dell Latitude XX80 drivers won’t import into MDT Litetouch”

Why is it that Dell keeps adding this driver to the cab file it has been blowing driver import since the E7250 in late 2014. It’s 3 years later you think they’d fix it or just take it out the ControlVault and advise us to create a custom task sequence to install the exec from their drivers site. Just do what panasonic did because of similar issues, give us a sfx file companion for each model.