Noise

Ooooo K then....

God, what a mess that autoexec.bat is. Anyhow, the 1st menu is from not from any part of the autoexec.bat - it's from a modified boot partition on the floppy, more info can be found here. The second "menu" is from a standard DOS Multi-Boot config.sys file. Have a look at the config.sys file on that floppy of yours. You'll find more information on the web about how to make a menu'ed config.sys file in later versions of DOS. If this all sounds like greek to you, then you're in trouble.

Just type setcddl.exe in the command window to get usage - NO SWITCHES. Here, I'll do it for ya: C:\>setcddl ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SETCDDL.EXE - Changes Drive letter assignments for devices in Win2000 Version 1.0 - March 17th, 2000 by Steven Haack - Microsoft Consulting Services ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Usage: setcddl <Drive> <Device name> add a drive letter setcddl -r <Drive> remove a drive letter setcddl -c <Drive> Changes 1st CD-Rom to specified drive letter Example: setcddl e:\ \Device\CdRom0 Sets CD-Rom0 to drive e:\ setcddl -r e:\ Removes e:\ from associated device setcddl -c e:\ Changes 1st Cd-Rom to e:\ NOTE: You cannot set a device to a specified drive letter, if there is already a drive letter associated with that device. You must remove the current drive letter first, and then assign a new one. The -c option to change the drive letter of the 1st CD-Rom does the removal for you.

Oh Alright, I'll give up my little utility. remember people, I had this first. copy to your system32 directory - call from the command line to get usage. It will change the drive letter of any installed CD/DVD drive(s) from the command line. It does no error checking - for example, if you try to assign the 1st cdrom drive as drive C:, it doesn't check to see if drive C: is already allocated and strange things like black holes may form. setcddl.exe

Try %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c "C:\Program Files\CDR Open\CDR.exe" open E:

Are you sure you're using XP Home... I got this same problem with XP Tablet edition and XP Media Center Edition

I use a Ouji Board as a mouse pad. You wouldn't believe the weird web sites you find. And for online gaming it's great, in counter-strike I fire before I actually see the enemy!

Right when I started unzipping too.

WindowsPE would probably work. I'd think with Windows 2000 you would have a problem with the SCSI ID section section in the boot.ini - you know, the part that says multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT this information would change with different systems. You would probably get Invalid boot device errors.

Thanks Gosh! The drivers will not be detected during setup. These drivers are for network (lpd) printers. As such, the drivers have to be manually installed when you setup the printer. Just like the old days In Windows 98 I could add printer drivers just by copying the inf and related files to the C:\Windows\INF directory. Perhaps this will still work. The dosnet.inf and txtsetup.sif may work also. However, like I already mentioned, I don't need these drivers available immediately during setup - so it may be overkill. Oh and thanks for the suggestion ander, I already thought of that. Printer INF files arn't structured to install like that (no [DefaultInstall] section).

I'm trying to add a bunch of Xerox Postscript Printer files to my installation source directory. The link references the (self-extracting) file containing the drivers I need to incorporate. Basically it's just a bunch of standard PPD Files along with a inf file used for installation. Pretty simple stuff. Have any of you incorporated updated printer drivers into your source? If so, how did you do it. Do I just copy all the PPD's and the inf file to my i386 directory? (doubt its that easy) I just want these updated printers to show up in the list when I try to add new printers to the PC.

Ummm... I can't really help with the Media Player problem you're having. But I do have one question. And by the way, that's really nice commenting you've done in your srvpack.inf file. How is it that you have only one entry in the [ProductCatalogsToInstall] section? I was under the impression that every kb*.exe program needed a cooresponding kb*.cat file to go with it. Is this incorrect?

The only way is to partition the drive (using ghost or partition magic or some such program) before you run your installation. Then configure your winnt.sif file NOT to repartition the drive.

I've tried everything to delete that directory - nothing works from the command line - NOTHING! No combinations of renaming or deleting work. Maybe a vbscript could delete it. This is a weird directory. During troubleshooting I created this directory manually and tried various methods to delete it. Some of them worked too! Except, when these methods were tried on a quicktime created directory they didn't work! There is some weird invisible charactors or something going on here. s*** like this drives me crazy! (can I say s***?)

The domain should still be available on the different subnet. From your unattended.txt it looks like you're using a WINS server. Connecting to the domain should be no problem. Looking through your unattend.txt I don't see anything wrong. Is this a windows 2000 installation? I noticed the C:\WINNT in your unattend.txt. If so make sure it's slipstreamed with SP4.

Keep it simple. Add the "bad" web site to your hosts file with an address of 0.0.0.0. They will never be able to access the web pages to download the programs in the 1st place. You can read up on this and download a pre-done version HERE. I also use IE-SpyAdd.

Active@ Partition Recovery can do this for you. It's shareware. I used it last week to save my dumb a** after I wiped a valuable partition. I know it backs-up and restores MBR's.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard

Welp, looks fine to me. I see nothing wrong with it. Do you have more than one NIC in this PC you're building?

Files and directories arn't the only things that can be controlled with user permissions. Certain areas of the registry are also accessed according to the logged on users rights. So if you're having an application fail and complains about NTFS file permissions, giving her permission to read/write that particular folder (i.e. C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32) won't necessarly solve the problem. There's probably a registry key that she won't be able to modify/read. This type of problem usually happens from a poorly written application. Although there are some applications that genuinely require admin rights (i.e. Ghost, WindowsUpdate, Etc).

You need an Exchange Server to share data like that. You should have no problem setting one up really quick, judging by the way you type.

Keep your foldernames 8.3 compliant. Long directory names are a bad idea during this particular part of the setup process.

In your unatted.txt or winnt.sif file change / add the following: [unattended] UnattendMode=FullUnattended UnattendSwitch=Yes OemSkipEula=Yes TargetPath=\WINDOWS ExtendOemPartition=0 FactoryMode=Yes FileSystem=ConvertNTFS Repartition=No WaitForReboot=No NtUpgrade=No OemPreinstall=YesIt's only a guess - you may still get the other partitions whacked so be careful.

Try adding (quick and dirty here - adapt accordingly) AutoLogonCount = 2 (REG_DWORD) DefaultDomainName = "%COMPUTERNAME%" (REG_SZ)

Oooo That's also where the registry key is set to turn on the network activity icon in the system tray (blinky lights during net activity next to the clock). You could do this with a VB script. You would first have to enumerate (get a list of) all the ethernet adapters in the system. Then you would have to figure out which ones were "real" as some are virtual adapters (vpn, dialup connections, etc). Then jump to the registry key you specified and make the change. Nasty nasty stuff. I'm a batch file guy myself, this type of VB script would take me about 3 days to do properly with the learning curve and all. Any takers?