sensationull

These methods look great, thanks for the help everyone.

Thanks for those methods I will try them however it is not an ideal solution as both of these methods mean that you have to wait for it to format the hard drive and copy the files before you can enter the information. This means either having to wait around or come back to the system half way through. I was wondering if there was any inventive way, perhaps using a boot loader to prompt for the values before text mode setup. Hence you could chuck the cd in, enter the required variables almost instantly and not have to revisit the machine other than to retreive the cd.

Hi, I work at several schools providing tech support and would like to create an extremely low maintinence XP distribution CD for restoring and adding workstations. What I would like it to preferably is ask all of its questions at the very start ie preferably before or during text mode. I would like to be able to insert the CD, have it firstly prompt me for a hostname and then have it format, copy etc. As we are on a Windows 2000 network I will leave all of the software installation to Active directory allowing one cd to work for many different stations. It would be good if after prompting for the username it installed, joined the domain and then rebooted to allow it to install all of the assigned software. Secondly I would like to be able to join to the domain in a specified Organisational Unit so that it can get the correct software. Does anyone know whether it is possible to either change the default on the server from Computers to a different OU or specify it in the winnt.sif. I know that you can use netdom.exe but does this have any drawbacks in comparisson to using the winnt.sif join to domain section. Thanks. I would be grateful for any help or suggestions.