Whatanut

I build images for my corporation. It's deployed across some 30,000 computers across the US, France, Germany on dozens of hardware types. I've found that my images will pretty much work on most any computer as long as the HD controller drivers are made available to sysprep and the machine is ACPI compliant. The big key for me was discovering the HAL that is "MOST" compatible with most PCs. As long as I set the HAL to "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC" then it usually works. This may not be the most optimised configuration for a machine. But it works. And works well. This will even work on a multiprocessor machine with a modified sysprep.inf. Just need to add the proper line to have it update the HAL to the multiprocessor HAL. Just put the updated sysprep.inf on a floppy during first boot and the image updates... It can be done...

ok... so it looks like this is a combination of problems... I finally have a CD that actually installs correctly in a completely unattended fashion. in the process I learned two things. 1: The order of the winnt.sif file can make a difference... as much as it isn't supposed to. I had "Repartition = Yes" as the 5th item under the [unattended] section initially. This was perfectly fine with SP1. SP2 does not appear to like that. I moved it to the top of the list and that fixed half the problem. 2: I would swear my sp1 CD would just wipe out whatever was on the drive. But obivously that's not the case. The machine I was testing my CD on had a full hard disk with three linux partitions. That confused the unattended installation. So.. after fixing these two things the CD seems to be working as it used to. Well... almost. The one full install I've let it complete complained about not being able to load the installation for some drivers... on to the next battle. Sounds like some other sp2 related problems I've been reading about.

alrighty. What am I missing here? I've been using an SP1 slipstreamed CD for quite some time in building PC images. So I thought (this is microsoft.. I should know better) that I would be able to simply pull the dir structure off the CD, apply SP2, dump it back to the CD and all would be good. *bzzzzt* My previous slipstreamed CD would automatically wipe all partitions on a drive, create one new one and do the install. Walk away and come back in 30 minutes logged into the desktop. Now with SP2 I cannot get it to do this. No matter what I do it stops at the partitioning phase and prompts me to manually setup the partitions. I have updated my old CD to SP2. I've created a brand new CD from scratch with SP2. I've even gone and created a cusom install using nlite. Nothing seems to work. Most all the posts on see on these boards are the opposite (how do I make it let me do my own partitions?). Has anybody tried to get this working in a truely fully unattended setup without using such things as diskpart? It's annoying that something has been changed with SP2 that makes a previous functionality not work. Below is my latest winnt.sif incarnation. This is Windows XP Pro volume licensing edition. Hopefully somebody can point out some error I'm making. WINNT.SIF