Vann

1 or 0, yes or no, true or false, it's all boolean baby. Anyways, Repartition="Yes" will cause Windows Setup to destroy all your partitions and make one big partition. If you want that, set it to yes. Repartition="No" causes Windows Setup to install Windows on the first available partition, keeping your existing partition table intact. There is no user input either way, it just depends on what you want Windows Setup to do.

Perhaps the best solution here isn't a technical one.

jaclaz, Sheesh, man, what's with the attitude? In the English I speak "timeout" is a perfectly normal word for what's going on here.

Firefox all the way. Aside from a favorite or necessary site using the abomination that is Active X, I don't know why anyone still uses IE.

On a reasonably fast computer I can get my unattended CD to install in about 20-30 minutes. This involves partitioning, formatting, and installing several additional applications. What's more, if you use /makelocalsource with winnt32.exe it allows you to remove the CD after about 5 minutes and use it on another computer. I don't see what the big deal is. If you just absolutely must save that extra ten minutes then perhaps you should start installing Windows ten minutes earlier.

I use Linux on all my personal machines, but my job involves configuration computer labs at my university. On those machines I installed SP2 as soon as it came out.

I bet it's the communists. They're always trying to sneak into my computer.

AFAIK, that moves "My Pictures" but does not touch "Documents and Settings" In fact, Microsoft's recommended way of changing this after installation involves searching the registry and replacing every instance of "C:\Documents and Settings" with whtever you want. See this article.

By far the easiest way is to use the "ProfilesDir" option in winnt.sif. Just set ProfileDirs=<whatever>. I personally have a second partition, and so do ProfilesDir=D:\

In general HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT in 2000 and especially XP references settings before any user logs in. For example, if you change the font size in HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT it doesn't apply to every user, but it will apply to the classic logon window. Basically, every user has what is called a registry hive, stored in %ProfilesDir%\%Username%\ntuser.dat. This is where all their registry settings are stored. When a user logs on their registry hive gets loaded into HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and it is unloaded when the user logs out. Default user settings are stored in the Default User's registry hive, i.e., %DefaultUserDir%\ntuser.dat. Like schalti said, HKEY_USERS references all the registry hives of users who have logged in at some point by using their SID. That's the {S-1238-123987132987-blahblah} stuff you see under there. Registry tweaks applied to HKEY_CURRENT_USER will only affect the currently active profile. Most of the time this means the user that is currently logged in. However, during the installation process the Default User's hive is loaded into HKEY_CURRENT_USER, which is why during unattended setup you want to import user configuration stuff to HKEY_CURRENT_USER. In XP regedit can now load and unload hives (you used to have to use regedit32). Also, there are command-line utilities installed by default in XP that were once part of the resource kit in 2k that allow you to mount, unmount, and search registry hives, like reg and regfind.

If Windows can't handle your network card out of the box then it can't handle it during the install process. I know, for example, Dell GX260 computers have ethernet cards that Windows can't do anything about. A network install is an impossibility unless you get the network drivers on there to begin with.

If the username is static just put in whatever the username is. Otherwise, if you copy it to the Default User directory during the installation process it will get copied to every user whenever their account is first created.

Unless, of course, one of those drivers to be downloaded is a network driver.

I sent an email to my super-secret Microsoft insider by issuing the command xcopy /? and he responded almost instantly, telling me /I If destination does not exist and copying more than one file, assumes that destination must be a directory.

DEL without any additional arguments will ask for confirmation before deleting something. Run del /? from the command line to see additional options.