I recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2970 with a SATA DVD drive. I installed 2008 Server Core x64 without a problem but after the install I noticed that the DVD drive wasn't present. After a lot of searching online and finding nothing about this, I decided to contact Dell Support. They gave me a driver for the SATA controller the DVD was using but no way to install it on Server Core.

After a lot of searching on the net I found a few ways to install the driver. All but one of them was wrong (drvload and drvinst don't seem to work). The correct answer (pnputil) was found on Scotty McLeod's blog, more specifically, this post: http://winserverteam.org.uk/blogs/scotty/archive/2007/08/12/server-core-and-drivers.aspx.

So, I went back to the server and tried loading the driver that Dell told me to load using pnputil but I was presented with this error:

Processing inf : bchtsw32.inf
Failed to install the driver on any of the devices on the system : No more data is available.
Adding at least one driver package failed!

Take a look at the filename in the "processing inf:" line. Do you see that 32? That's right, Dell gave me a 32bit version of the driver for my 64bit machine! Oh well, I went back to the dell website and downloaded the x64 driver and then used the pnputil command all was good. The exact URL's and usage instructions are below:

1. Download Broadcom BCM5785 (HT1000) SATA Controller Driver (Dell package number R181056): http://support.us.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R181056&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=246834
2. Extract the above driver to a location of your choosing. I used c:\InstallFiles\dell\drivers\R181056.
3. Run the following: pnputil -i -a c:\installfiles\dell\drivers\r181056\bchtsw64.inf. If this command finishes properly you will receive a notice stating: Successfully installed the driver on a device on the system.
4. Run diskpart and from the diskpart> prompt run list volume. You should see the drive letter for your DVD drive.

Hope this helps!