Dobby

What 1280x1024?! Have you added any display drivers to the install?

looks fine

I can only assume there is a problem with one of the drivers. Since I have successfully integrated the ACPI drivers I recommend you remove all others and test the installation again. Then add them back in one by one until you find the one causing the problem.

You are correct in your assumption. However, Vista is now pretty good at installing the correct drivers for your hardware so I recommend that unless you are seeing unknown devices in Device Manager that you let Vista install the default drivers. Of course if you using vLite to remove the default drivers you may have problems with drivers that rely on the default Vista components. These days the only drivers I tend to put into the special drivers folders are for hardware that is not recognised. Video drivers and sometimes chipset tend to be the only exception but certainly nVidia's ones need to be installed with the installer. Make sure also that the drivers you have there are signed. Non-signed or XP drivers don't tend to work very well. Can you post you Autounattend.xml and the exact folder structure of the drive (screenshot would do)

Have you tried this? 2 is correct What's the Intel INF? Do you mean the lan drivers. Start with one set of drivers. And BTW it doesn't matter what other files/folders are in the drivers folder. I find it easiest just to place the whole bundle in there.

Can you install Vista manually? I'm sure you can but I just wanted to check. Also, have you checked the Windows\Panther logs setupact.log and setuperr.log and also in the UnattendGC folder (under the panther folder). Sometime (but not often) they give a bit more info about the error. If you press Shift+F10 when you get the error you'll get a command prompt. You could just try navigating to the folder mentioned just to make sure it's visible. Lastly, try removing all but one of the drivers you are trying to install. If you list the drivers this may help us diagnose the problem. Also what medium do you have the Autounattend.xml and drivers on and what filesystem is it formatted as.

Sorry I should have said a lot rather than most. The most popular one for tracking software is versiontracker.com and this site definitely requires the vendors to update their profile. As for other sites I've not found one which does it well or tracks a large number of applications and has the ability to add them easily. My search was be no means extensive though. I check the original vendors website if that's what you mean. Ruby on Rails No. At the moment I only track version changes. I can add any application that has a website. Some websites are a little tricky as they use Javascript to check which browser you have for plugin based software and if you're not using Javascript (i.e. because it is a bot) this can be a problem.

You're welcome I don't know the answer to that. I've not had to install SATA drivers since XP SP1! Anyone else?

Yes it's correct. It's checking each drive for a file called DriversRoot.txt which you should have created on the drive that you have your drivers on. When it finds this file it sets an environment variable called DriversRoot to it. This is what is then used in Autounattend.xml to tell WinPE where to find the drivers for your hardware %DriversRoot%\drivers is the drive and folder that you should have your drivers in. X:\setup.exe tells WinPE to run windows setup. This is needed because you are overriding what WinPE does when it boots. I think X:\ is a ram drive that WinPE creates and copies a bunch of startup files to (but don't quote me on that. I never checked). Either that or it's just a drive mapped from the DVD probably to give a constant drive letter that setup knows about. (As your DVD drive could be D:, E:, or F: depending on how many hard drives you have).

That batch script is correct I've just compared it to the one I use and it's identical except that I don't add the trailing slash to the path but do it in the Autounattend.xml. But that is purely cosmetic. Do you get the console window appear when WinPE first boots and tells you that DriversRoot has been set?

There are two components. One called Windows-International-Core and one called Windows-International-Core-WinPE. The WinPE one only applies to the PE pass and the other applies to specialize and oobeSystem passes. I'm not sure about the languages as I only use English and Russian (for the wife) but I noticed something about Language Packs so maybe you need one of these Packs to be able to select the appropriate language. Sorry I can't be anymore help.

Ah ok. Glad I'm not alone. Guess it's not supprising as there are plenty of other bugs in the setup! Well the auto app install using RunSynchronous is killing me. One badly formatted command and Vista Setup says "No, not going to install. But not telling you which one is causing the problem out of 30+." And the logs are no help either. Ho Hum...

I've actually written an application to do exactly that. Basically I scrape the page with the version number on it and when it changes I know about it. I can run a command and it checks 60 applications in about 10 seconds. Most sites rely on the application being in their database or reply on companies to update them. My app goes straight to the application website. It's not ready for public use yet but I'm using it for my own purposes which is a good thing.

If I set the resolution in PE to 1280x1024x32 it sets the resolution correctly however the same settings used in specialize and OOBE passes to fail. I checked the setupact.log file and it said it couldn't set the display settings, it tried setting the width and height and then the colour depth but still could not set them (got a -1 failure code on all attempts). I wouldn't mind so much but once I get the application installs working the number of apps is not going to fit on the screen! I thought it might be something to do with needing drivers but then I don't understand why it works in WinPE. Any ideas anyone? UPDATE: Looks like it actually might be working in OOBE afterall. Still a problem with Specialize and Audit passes though

@razormoon - The reason for the goto is so it loops round and keeps checking all drives until it finds the DriversRoot file. WinPE starts up before the drives get mapped so if you just did one check through the drives you might not find the DriversRoot file. @seabird - Your config looks correct. So is the console window coming up with the drive that DriversRoot has been set to?

BTW firegeier's website is back up so the links in the first post are valid again. @seabird check what your setting %DriversRoot% to. If there is no trailing slash you'll need it between %DriversRoot% and Drivers. If you followed Firegeier's tutorial on Installing drivers from Media then your SetDriversRoot.cmd should contain an echo which will tell you what %DriversRoot% was set to. I remember getting that error and if I remember correctly it was down to a bad/incorrect drivers path.

Just came across this. Looks like a nicely ordered list and sensible options for selecting architecture type. What would be better still would be a direct link to the download or maybe some way to add it to the Windows Update Catalog list. And why the hell do you have to validate every single download. Have they heard of cookies (probably not secure enough I know but they could have a login or something and just periodically ask for validation or something.)

Can anyone tell what the update rollups are for? I'm trying to figure out a way to search the update catalog without getting 1000 hits back (did they actually get anyone to test this bloomin' thing before they released it?). If I search for 'Vista Critical' or 'Vista Rollup' I get a single page of results which is much easier to handle but I need to know does this cover everything or is there a better way? I saw the hotfixshare too but it doesn't seem like a very efficient way to get updates. We have had hotfixes almost as long as we've had Windows. Why have they not got a decent solution yet?! UPDATE: Actually I've just looked at the rollups and bar a few exceptions it's mainly the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool so I guess that's a no!

Yea this is a great idea. I use media portal too and it would be cool to remove. I'm only using Vista Basic with it but from what I remember I thought it was media player rather than media center that was required. I'm sure I removed Media Center although maybe it is separate in Basic. Mmm. I'll have to check that.

This is a known issue. Just click the Bootable ISO and also Enable before apply check box on the Tasks screen

I don't want to start another text editor war but... I'm sorry, when an editor lists code folding as the first feature in it's list I have to snigger. Seriously though, I've not seen anything like textmates bundle system before. Don't knock it until you try it. Of course it does depend on what sort of text editing you are doing. No golden hammer as they say.

I do a lot of Ruby on Rails development and have recently discovered this wonderful editor. Many people rave about TextMate being the ultimate editor for the Mac and while there is plenty of choice on the PC nothing quite compares. I've tried many editors in my time and many have syntax highlighting for various languages but the power of Bundles in TextMate means you get all the tools setup as well. Many editors allow command line tools to be set up but none provide the flexibility, integration and support of TextMate Bundles. E provides compatibility with TextMate bundles and although you can't use them all straight out of the box much work has been done to ensure they are useable. There are commands and syntax highlight support for hundreds of languages. It just feels right! It's just made it to 1.0 release + a few minor updates. There is more work to do but I think it's pretty solid. It's not free but for $35 it's as good as.

Hey calm down Mav. I was only pointing out what I thought he was talking about.

Perhaps ID is suggesting that you don't even need the catalog files?

Slippedstreamed hotfixes won't show in the hotfix history as they are applied before Windows is installed. This always used to be the case anyway. Not all hotfixes apply to all systems. That's why you get the message that it couldn't be updated. You are using the x64 hotfixes right? I recommend you try to find a hotfix that applies to your system (by successfully manually installing it first) then try to apply it in vLite. Check version numbers both times just to make sure. Why? Another option with hotfixes is AutoPatcher as I've recently discovered. It contains all hotfixes for all versions of Windows. This software will tell you which hotfixes apply to you. You can then either grab them from the install folder and put them in vLite or use AutoPatcher to slipstream them (although the slipstream feature is not currently working but I'm bugging them about that!)