joebells

man I thought it was such a good idea and got pretty excited about it.

what about when you do a network install. Does it just use a generic driver?

shizer I didn't even give that any thought. I guess that negates the driver idea.

hmmm. I've been off doing different things and haven't played much with my unattended install since I posted last in your other post edg21 but I have it almost completely setup. And am gonna try to finish it up today. I think I will switch it over to the ftp version though. Here's something interesting I just thought about though, not sure at all yet if it will work just started thinking about it. I just read about detachedprogram for the first time today. from what i've read it runs around the 39 minute mark before drivers are installed? So maybe run ftp.exe or wget from detachedprogram and download a driver folder you have on the ftp server to %SYSTEMDRIVE%/Drivers ? That way you would never have to make a new cd when new drivers come out. Some things I'm not sure about yet. would installation require those drivers to be present in their respective folders at the very beginning of installation? Like does it scan those folders for presence and contents at the very beginning of installation? Or would it be ok that those folders wouldn't have anything in them or weren't even be present until i ran detachedprogram and filled them with the newest drivers from the ftp? And there would be a problem when you got a new machine that had some hardware that you didn't have before. Your winnt.sif wouldn't have an entry for a folder for the new hardware. You could temporarily replace one of the folders with the new drivers contents on the ftp server I guess and then when your done installing that machine put it back for the other machines. But that would be a pain. I wonder if theres a way to setup a ftp program to offer a certain set of files to a client based on their mac address? Then you could have a setup for each machine on your network and when they connected they would download just a audio_driver folder, Network_driver folder, Chipset_driver folder, and then maybe some other folders like miscellaneous_drivers. I think that would be the ultimate way to do it as then you really would have a cd that would work on any machine after you set him up with a profile on the ftp server. I wonder if this way will work? what does anyone think of it?

I wish there was a way to use something like this at the very beginning so you could have the latest drivers. But anyway. I've got most everything setup. I've just got office2k3 to setup. and maybe a few more programs not sure yet. I'll post back and curse the whole idea if it ends up not working

thanks edg21 I'm working on an install using this method right now. I'm modifying it for ftp use though as I don't want to install and configure a webserver. I was looking into doing a distribution share but I wasn't exactly sure how to do it using my gentoo/samba machine. When I would attempt to create the distribution share setupmanager would say that it couldn't enable the share. This so far with my limited tests seems like it will work. Thanks.

piano man we are saying that if you have more than one machine and they don't have exactly the same hardware then you can't use that zip file for both machines. Also if you want to change any programs or settings its pretty easy to extract your unattended cd make the neccessary changes quick and then reburn and wolla you now have a cd that will work on any number of machines. If you go the zip file route then you have to install onto each machine type you have make the changes to each machine type and then make a new zip file for each machine. I think the zip file idea would only be good for a single machine type environment and even then I would still just go with an unattended cd because of the uid and other issues and ease of updating.

no I just for some reason don't want to use nlite, no offense to the programmer, I imagine it works pretty good but I have read of some problems here and there and would rather just leave messenger in if it comes to that than mess around with another program. thanks for the suggestion though.

yeah being able to use an unattended install on many different machines is a huge, huge advantage I think.

is msmsgs supported for a sp2 unattened installation? I ask because the new ref.chm for sp2 doesn't list it and instead lists WMAccess. I put them both in my winnt.sif but I thought I'd ask while I'm finishing up my cd to maybe save me from having to burn another cd.