Unattended from a HDD instead of CDorDVD?

[Nugzo]

Hi everyone. Been makin unattended cd's and dvd's for some time now thanks to yall. I was wondering if an unattended install could be done from a hard drive instead of cd or dvd ? I searched and didnt find anything. any scripts or links would be appreciated.

[army20]

PXE boot with RIS server only

Correct me if i'm wrong

[Adventureman]

Nugzo,

I posted the same question on Nov 17 and again in a later post. I didn't get any kind of workable answer. I would really like to know if this is possible. There has got to be a way to do this. But based upon the lack of responses, it appears that no one knows???

[erik_demon]

You can do an unattended install from a harddrive, I did it myself.

The best way to do so, is by creating a BartPE cd to boot from.

The advantage of BartPE, is that it can work with NTFS, and that you can use WINNT32 instead of WINNT.

Formating and starting the installation

After I used BartPE to boot, I use this script to format the C drive, and to start copying some windows files.

@rem SetupMgrTag
@echo off
title Microsoft Windows XP, Professional Edition Setup

set AnswerFile=D:\WINXP\unattend.txt
set SetupFiles=D:\WINXP\I386

echo.
echo Windows Setup will now format your C:\ drive
echo and start the Windows XP installation program.
echo.
echo If you continue all data on your C:\ drive will be erased!
echo.

pause

echo.
echo Formating C:\ . . .
echo.

FORMAT C: /fs:ntfs /V:Erik_Demon /y
cacls C: /p Everyone:F

echo.
echo Done . . .
echo.

echo.
echo Starting the installation program for Microsoft Windows XP, Professional Edition . . .
echo.

%SetupFiles%\winnt32.exe /s:%SetupFiles% /unattend:%AnswerFile% /copysource:lang /tempdrive:C /syspart:C

echo Done . . .
echo.

echo.
echo Restarting Computer . . .

exit.

THE $OEM$ folder

I don't have a clue why, but your $OEM$ folder must be IN your I386 folder, otherwise it won't be copyed.

Problems I had

The first couple of times my installation failed. I had used NLite to shrink and adjust my CD, I also had the RyanVM lite update pack intergated. Although these things worked great with a CD, i got all sorts of errors(don't know why), so I choose to use a normal XP-CD with only SP2 included. Now my installation works great.

Good Luck!!

[tguy]

Hi all,

The short answer to your question is YES you can build a PC or server from another hard disk.

First question - Where will the hard disk that has your source files be located? Network share or another internal hard drive in the PC or server?

Second - You will need to have a boot disk or boot CD to use to access this second hard disk. You may also need partitioning and drive formatting utilities like FDISK and FORMAT.COM to access the disk you are wanting to land the new OS on.

Third - If you are building this way you will need to move the $OEM$ folder into the i386 directory on your source hard disk.

Fourth - Rename the WINNT.SIF to UNATTEND.TXT and copy it to the root of the source disk.

Fifth - Start your installation by booting to the source disk. CD to i386 then launch winnt /b /u:<path to unattend.txt> /s:<path to source files>

You may find yourself constrained to the size of the C: partition you can initially create but DISKPART.EXE should help you fix that.

Hope this helps.

P.S. There is tons of info. on doing builds this way on the web, Google Network based unattended installations