Techlevel: Dabbler
Production Level : The unwashed masses of classroom environments.
OS: Windows 10 Pro

I have a few diskless windows 10 clients booting from ipxe and iscsi. It's kind of awesome and extremely niche use case. I would like to know how setup.exe forces the nic driver to a boot critical start type? To clarify the inf is not that start type. Can anyone better explain what reflected into the image means? In the case of boot critical drivers? I'm not sure that's the same path iscsi follows. But it seems close.

is there a way to manually do this using dism/winpe to an already imaged (sysprep'd) volume? I am trying to NOT have to use setup.exe to accomplish the same thing.

Reason is backend is block storage. Setup.exe is the only way I know of to apply an image to be iscsi bootable. But that's now a full installation that's block unique. My hope is to have a single master sysprep'd image and a differencing image per client. Saves 18gb per client.

At this point I'd like to ask for books, terminology corrections, further reading, and anything else to understand the initia driver load boot process.