Broadcom NetXtreme Drivers Windows 10 Drivers HowTo

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General Background

Installing Broadcom NetXtream network drivers, and upgrading the firmware in Windows 10 Pro is crazy. In the end I found out that the Windows 10 drivers were right inside of the broadcom/dell installer, you just needed to know how to get thim. I could not find a vendor file that was an archive of all the drivers, instead it looks like I could only find setup files that ACTUALLY had the "Windows10-x64" driver folders inside of them, but would fail to update/ugprade the drivers because I was not running Windows server.

The first thing I needed to do was to actually find the drivers. Somehow, the broadcom site was useless. I have similar experiences finding drivers/firmware sometimes with raid cards ever since broadcom bought the world of ethernet and raid from other vendors. I actually found more up to date versions of the drivers on dells site. I would search for driver V.ER.SION. I only knew there was a new version avail because right on the dell driver site, for the dell R230 I was working on there was a firmware update that stated needed version 21.8 of the drivers.

I downloaded the firmware, and looked for the drivers, but all I could find was drivers for window server. So I googled and found two sets of Dell Drivers

  • 21.80
  • 21.90

Reading the release notes, and some txt files that dell provided let me know that both driver versions were compatable with the firmware

this was a note from 21.90: 

- Broadcom NetXtreme network device firmware, 21.8.1 (Family Firmware Version
  21.81.3)
- Broadcom NetXtreme network device firmware, 21.8 (Family Firmware Version
  21.80.9)

The dell site for 21.80 firmware already told me I needed 21.8 driver. I ran the firmware upgrade package again after reboot to verify that it did upgrade firmware

  • Funny that the firmware is allowed to upgrade in Windows 10 Pro...and does not have the server check.

First I installed 21.8.3 firmware with 21.8 driver, and everything seemed to work fine.

Next I kept 21.8.3 firmware, and upgraded to 21.90 driver just because.

Extracting the Driver

  • Open Dell Package
  • Extract
  • Now usually the extracted drivers are there, but alas what you have is a broadcom setup that will not run unless it is executed inside of windows server
  • If you open DrvCfg64.ini with notepad, you can see where I am getting at.
    • There were some commands in there, and one of the commands was to extract drivers
    • I wonder if I could have gotten a list of switches with /?
      • yes /? worked, and gave me command options
  • So pretty simple:
[DriverExtract]
1=.\payload\brcmsetup.exe /s /v"/qn EXTRACTDRIVERS=\"$PATH$\" LOGFILE=\".\debug.log\""
  • Opened up command prompt inside of payload dir
  • Ran
brcmsetup.exe /s /v"/qn EXTRACTDRIVERS=\"DRIVERS\"
  • Found DRIVERS/production/Windows10-x64
  • Installed Driver Manually (Have Disk)
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