SirLudicrus

But remember that this does work without a hassle for our private driver, so there must be something different between the two that is causing the fully unattended install to work with our driver and not with the LSI one... That's what I'm mainly posting about. For reasons I'm not at liberty to explain, the "don't remaster ISO" constraint is inflexible. Thanks for the answers so far.

Hi! Newbie poster here (but I've got a good tale to spin.) Due to the circumstances I am working with, I am in charge of managing an unattended XP install system with the following stipulations: - I may NOT remaster the Windows XP ISO. - I need to provide textmode SCSI drivers, as well as the unattended answer file, on a floppy. - If at all possible, there should be no need to press F6 to enable usage of the drivers. This system has worked in the past with a private set of drivers. Winnt.sif on the floppy basically looks like this: OemPreinstall=No DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore ... [OemBootFiles] driver.sys driver.cat driver.inf disk.tag txtsetup.oem [MassStorageDrivers] "Our Driver"="OEM" In this case, with this setup: A: = Floppy D: = XP CD The setup is fully unattended and there is no need to press F6 to get Windows Setup to use the drivers. We now need to bundle the LSI Logic LSISAS1068 drivers instead of our private driver in certain cases. With my script, the generated floppy now looks like this: OemPreinstall=No DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore ... [OemBootFiles] lsipseud.inf mpixp32.cat symmpi.inf symmpi.sys symmpi.tag txtsetup.oem [MassStorageDrivers] "LSI PCI Fusion-MPT Miniport Driver (XP 32-bit)"="OEM" In this situation, however, I must press F6 to enable use of the LSI driver (which works perfectly.) Otherwise, Windows craps out and says "there are no hard drives in your system." Which is odd, because in the little status bar on the screen, I see this flash by: "Windows is loading files (symmpi.sys)" (which the private driver does too, so I would assume that is an indicator of me having done something right.) So... What is the difference here? Why can't I have a fully unattended install with the LSI driver? I've been trawling the web and this setup (OemPreinstall=No with a required mass storage driver and a NO F6 requirement) appears to be very uncommon. Here are my thoughts so far on what the possible causes could be: - The LSI driver is not signed (mpixp32.cat is a mostly blank file.) However, my DriverSigningPolicy is set to ignore, so this shouldn't be a problem. (Wait.. or should it?) - The LSI driver uses two INF files instead of one: lsipseud.inf AND symmpi.inf. - Something in the txtsetup.oem provided by LSI is incompatible with whatever hidden feature Windows uses to provide this fully unattended driver loading capability. (I can provide this file in a little while.) - Line endings in any of the text files involved with the LSI driver (Unix style vs Windows style?) Incidentally, using nLite to remaster the ISO with the LSI driver does work, but I'm of course not allowed to do that in practice. Alternative questions that may help with this: - Is there a way to kick Windows Setup into a debug mode so I can see it perhaps fail to load my LSI driver for some particular reason? - Would switching to the "$OEM$" directory structure and specifying OemFilesPath=A:\ perhaps make this work? I see no practical difference. I'd appreciate any help I can get!