Scruge

Found the answer to my own question, funny how ms can send people on wild goose chases. All deployment info I read from MS instructed the use of unicode. Article 304305 SYMPTOMS When you are performing an unattended Windows 2000 installation by using a Winnt.sif file, you may receive the following error message: Line 1 of the INF file is invalid. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit. CAUSE This issue can occur if the Winnt.sif file was created by using an encoding scheme other than ANSI. The Winnt.sif file does not work if it is encoded with any of the following encoding formats: Unicode Unicode Big Endian UTF-8

Oh, I forgot heres what MS instructed.... • To start Windows 2000 Setup in unattended Setup mode from the Windows 2000 product CD 1. The computer must support booting from the CD-ROM drive—El Torito No Emulation CD boot support. 2. The answer file must be named Winnt.sif and must be placed on a floppy disk to be inserted as soon as the computer boots from the CD. The Winnt.sif answer file may also be placed on and run from a bootable CD. For more information about creating a bootable CD, see KB article Q167685, “How to Create an El Torito Bootable CD-ROM” at the Microsoft Product Support Services Web site: http://support.microsoft.com/support/ 3. The answer file must contain a [Data] section with the required keys specified. For more information, see “[Data],” later in this document.

DaveXP great walkthru. I came across a procedure from ms found in the deploy.cab "unattend.doc" on my Win2kpro disk that I thought would be easy to try. Basically it made light of using your standard win2k setup disk to boot from and then using a floppy to provide the winnt.sif file. However I've not had much luck with this method. I keep getting the error "Line 1 invalid in INF file" . Do you know what could be causing this problem? according to the instructions the file is basically an unattended.txt file thats been renamed to winnt.sif. The structure is the same as any other answer file MS uses in their other examples. I actually tried using the sample files they provided and the wizard as well only to get the same error. The way I understand it. The pc boots off the win2k cd but in the first few seconds the windows installer checks the a: drive for the winnt.sif file, if present, its loaded. Mine loads but always yeilds the error. FYI My Win2k disk has been slip streamed with sp4. Is there any chance this has had any effect on the installer? Appreciate any help you can provide. scruge WINNT.SIF follows: [Data] AutoPartition =0 MsDosInitiated = 0 UnattendedInstall = Yes [unattended] FileSystem = LeaveAlone TargetPath = WINNT DriverSigningPolicy = ignore OemPnPDriversPath = drivers\AGP\nvidia;drivers\AGP\sis;drivers\AGP\VIA;drivers\Audio\CMI973x OemSkipEula = yes [GuiUnattended] timezone = 020 [userData] computerName = 00000 FullName = scr OrgName = [Display] BitsPerPel = 16 Vrefresh = 60 XResolution = 1024 YResolution = 768 [TapiLocation] AreaCode = 281 [Networking] [identification] DomainAdmin = ADMIN JoinWorkgroup = WORKGROUP