rjs1980

Oh, to make one point clear, the in the previous post, the TB_TMP folder will hold the ThunderBird installation when the steps above are completed. So, the phrase <Path to setup>\setup.exe -ma -ira is referring to, in my case, C:\TB_TMP\SETUP.EXE -ma -ira where C:\TB_TMP = <PATH TO SETUP>

Create a silent install of Mozilla ThunderBird ---------------------------------------------- 1) Have a copy of Mozilla Firefox 2) Run the THunderBird setup program, and, while it is still on the first screen, go to your %USERPROFILE%\7z*.* folder (EG: where the mozilla setup extracts its files to before installation), and copy all of the files in that directory to a temporary directory. I will use TB_TMP for this howto. 3) Do the same with firefox that you did with ThunderBird. I used FF_TMP for the temp folder for FireFox. 4) Make 2 more temp folders, FF_XPCOM and TB_XPCOM. 5) Extract the XPCOM.XPI file in the FF_TMP directory to the FF_XPCOM directory. Extract the XPCOM.XPI file in the TB_TMP directory to the TB_XPCOM directory. (These files can be extracted using any standard unzip program) 6) Copy the install.js file from the FF_XPCOM to the TB_XPCOM folder. 7) Copy NSPR*.dll, plc*.dll, and plds*.dll from the FF_XPCOM folder to the TB_XPCOM folder. 8) Zip the TB_XPCOM folder (Make sure your program recreates the internal directory structure) to TB_XPCOM.ZIP 9) Backup your original XPCOM.XPI located in the TB_TMP folder. 10) Copy TB_XPCOM.ZIP to the TB_TMP folder and rename it XPCOM.XPI 11) Backup the setup.exe file in the TB_TMP folder 12) Download a mozilla installation (full install). I used this one: mozilla-win32-1.7.1-installer.exe Get it at ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases (You can also use the setup.exe from your unattended FireFox installation if you've done one using the mozilla setup method, that's what I did. ) 13) Using the same techniques we used in steps 1 and 2, run the Mozilla installation and when the first screen comes up, go to your %USERPROFILE%\7z*.* folder and get the setup.exe... I believe it's called Mozilla-Install.exe or something of the sort. (Sorry, I've already deleted the original Moz. installer and don't want to download it again). Anyhow, copy the setup executable (it's about 245k) to your TB_TMP folder. 14) Rename the moz. install file (the one we just retrieved from the %UESRPROFILE%\7z*.* folder) to setup.exe 15) Make a backup of the config.ini file that is now in TB_TMP. 16) Open the config.ini in TB_TMP and change the line that says Run Mode=Normal to Run Mode=Silent (It's the 1st non-commented line in the file) and save it. 17) Run this command: <path to setup>\Setup.exe -ma -ira to have TB install silently. 18) For those of you that really want to save some space, extract each of the XPI files to it's own directory and then recompress them using your programs highest level of compression. I did it with IZArc and the total size of the install directory for TB dropped from 22mb to 12mb. And hey, when you're dealing with 700mb (of which XP Pro SP2 takes about 590), 10 megs can be a life saver. The problem everyone keeps referring to where, when using the -ma -ira switch with a clean TB install, a freeze occurs at the install directory page because of some error/change in the xpcom component. This is a work-around for that error. Though three of the files are older, I'm assuming (since they were from netscape) that they have no major impact on TB's workings. And, so far, I have had no problems running it for 3 weeks. So, if anyone has a problem with TB after it's installed this way, let me know about! Have fun, and hope this helped --RJ

For %1% I'm trying to get the value of the path where the INF was installed from. In my case, \$OEM$ However, using the instructions in this forum for a pure INF install, whenever I try using %1% as the beginning of a path in the RunOnceEx registry entires, during the RunOnceEx part of install, every item show %1%\<whatever> can not be found. I haven't heard of the %CD% variable, i'll try that. One other thing... I have the $OEM$ directory set up in my cd's root path, and I have unattended install and OemPreinstall set to yes. Also, for some reason, %10% isn't returning the %windir% directory. If I use the pure inf install, and do copy the files to the HD under windows (EG: Installs are at %Windows%\INST), RunOnceEx popups up a "%10%\INST\<whatever>" not found error. Is there any other reason this could happen? Thanks for the response, I appreciate it.

Thanks for the response Greenmachine. As far as the non-hardcoded file is concerned, it works properly when it's ran under windows. If i'm not mistaken, cmdlines.txt is defaulted to \$OEM$\ as the path you are at during execution. It seems that running rundll32....... .\RunOnceEx.inf would work properly since it's being run from the same cmd file, and since cmdlines.txt has a path of \$OEM$\, then .\RunOnceEx.inf should point to \$OEM$\RunOnceEx.inf I will try the other ways though. I also just noted I had left my $OEM$ folder in i386 (did a network install earlier), so...none of the files existed where they should have. I'll try your suggestions and i'll retry what I had done. Thanks alot.

Hi. For starters, here are my files: cmdlines.txt RunOnceEx.cmd RunOnceEx.inf Ok, what i'm trying to do is use RunOnceEx from cmdlines. I want to run the setup files from the cd instead of the HD without the need for copying/erasing files from the HD. This works prefectly on my comp, so I'm sure I have the inf stuff correct. However, I did notice a KB article from MS stating that there is a known bug in the RunOnceEx script causing %1% to sometimes report the improper original installation directory for the inf. Since I could not get the %1% variable to work properly through a normal RunOnceEx T-13 installation (it kept reporting that %1%\...\Whatever couldn't be found), I thought a work around may be to install and execute the runonce commands when I was absolutely sure of the base directory of the starting program. Any how, with the current configuration (with or without the CMDOW command) when T-13 hits and cmdlines is processed the batch file is launched and immediately closes. The RunOnceEx gui listing the installs pending never comes up, so there is an error in the calls to rundll32. I've looked over this quite a few times (several hours now), and I have yet to notice what could be wrong. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps I'll still have some hair left when this is over with.