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Vann

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Everything posted by Vann

  1. 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.
  2. Perhaps the best solution here isn't a technical one.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. I bet it's the communists. They're always trying to sneak into my computer.
  8. 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.
  9. 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:\
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Unless, of course, one of those drivers to be downloaded is a network driver.
  14. 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.
  15. DEL without any additional arguments will ask for confirmation before deleting something. Run del /? from the command line to see additional options.
  16. During my unattended installation I install Firefox, which I want to set as the default browser. I used regshot to find out what is changed and tried importing those settings, but Firefox still asks me if I want to set it as the default browser. Does anyone know what the proper registry settings are? Or possibly have them on hand? Thanks.
  17. McAfee has this great program called the "McAfee Installation Designer" that lets you easily craft a custom installation of VirusScan Enterprise. The download is somewhere on McAfee's website, and you have to enter your grant code (which comes with VSE), but that's what you want.
  18. This has been discussed extensively already, in multiple threads, even. 2158 is the timestamp. Every SP2 final will display that. The actual version number is displayed when you right-click on ntoskrnl.exe and select "properties."
  19. I just noticed that the Unattended guide at MSFN recommends using winnt.sif to manage firewall settings. However, ref.chm is pretty opaque and the registry settings to add or remove ports or programs are very simple. So simple, in fact, I'm reluctant to call this a "HOWTO." Nevertheless, here it is. The key we're interested in is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\ This key contains values that control the general firewall options, e.g., whether or not the firewall is enabled or to notify the user if a program blocks something. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile] "EnableFirewall"=dword:00000001 "DoNotAllowExceptions"=dword:00000000 "DisableNotifications"=dword:00000001 This enables the firewall and disables notifications when an application blocks something. The next key is a subkey of the above. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\AuthorizedApplications\List] "C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\sessmgr.exe"="C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\sessmgr.exe:*:[b]Disabled[/b]:@xpsp2res.dll,-22019" This gibberish is the "Remote Assistance" rule, which of course I don't care about. The key is the part that says Disabled. The existence of a properly formatted value adds an entry to the list of programs in the firewall, and as you'd expect, the box is checked if it is set to "Enabled" and disabled if it is set to "Disabled" as it is above. Finally, you can allow additional ports. On our computers we run TightVNC so we need to open up the VNC service port, and also the little http daemon that VNC runs. [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\GloballyOpenPorts\List] "5800:TCP"="5800:TCP:*:Enabled:VNC HTTP" "5900:TCP"="5900:TCP:*:Enabled:VNC" The format is obvious. Enable port 5800 and 5900. They appear with the text "VNC HTTP" and "VNC" respectively. And that is that, really. I obtained all this using regshot and it seems the firewall configuration is this simple all around so if something is not covered here feel free to explore yourself. Also note that these are global options. A per-connection configuration is best suited for winnt.sif since after installation each connection has a random ID that you need to configure it via the registry. Of course, if you only have one connection then this is all you'd need.
  20. Alternatively, you can get a copy of Regshot and look at the differences in the registry before and after you apply your firewall rules. The registry entries are really quite simple. The key you're most interested in is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\StandardProfile\
  21. AutoIt is such an ugly hack. Besides which, it just adds another thing to keep track of during the unattended install. Anyways, here's the setup.exe.
  22. There's no reason for MS not to provide a command line utility to do this. The actual API to make this change is the same API that "net use" and company use, and you can do about everything else to configure users with that command. That said, I use a utility called "renuser.exe." If you search google for "renuser" it will turn up. I rename the Administrator right from cmdlines.txt.
  23. Honestly, it's much easier to use the setup.exe from Mozilla. I just zip up all the files and during T-13 run "unzip firefox.zip" then "firefox/setup.exe -ma -ra" and I'm done.
  24. Setup a CD with a batch file (or .cmd, or whatever) to run automatically via autorun.inf which installs SP2 then imports the proper registry settings to disable those features of SP2 that you don't want. The registry settings are all over this site. If some of the settings are per-user, then you'll have to do something marginally more involved. You can use "reg" to load registry hives. So, for every user, load their hive (default location is C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\ntuser.dat) to, say, HKEY_USERS\Temporary Hive then import registry files to that key. All this is pretty trivial to automate.
  25. Stop bumping this thread. There's a whole subforum dedicated to application switches, not to mention plenty of documentation on the web.
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