cdusseau

Maybe I am missing something, but Drivergeek is grabbing some of the drivers and ignoring some others. I know the ones I have hosted on the network work, because I can manually point the device to them and they work fine. Think of any reason why this is? I've even tried putting all the drivers onto a usb key but it just looks at them and ignores them. I can manually install them, but that defeats the goal here.

I am hosting the autounattend.xml file on a usb device. Basically I want to be able to call a batch file from the same device to copy files from said device to a certain directory on the computer. Problem is that I sometimes cannot say that the USB key will be E:. How can I determine exactly what letter the USB key is on presently? I was toying with the idea of searching for "autoattend.xml" since it it will always be present, but I'm not really sure how to do that. Amazingly I found a nifty little guide that helped me with this...SOLVED

Heh, I wish I could change the rules, but for some reasons beyond me we are required to do it this way. And USB floppies work pretty well. =) I'll just leave the HDDs partitioned and deal with the press a key prompt until we can just go ahead and use custom media. Thanks

Thanks for the info, I'll be sure to try it out. Just FYI, I am using a DELL OEM restore CD. When I do an attended install I do not need to activate, but when I use winnt.sif it requires me to enter a product key. I see no way around that short of the method you described. Although for pro there is a pre-activated master key that i referenced in my first post. I just wish I could use something like that. Though after looking at it once more, couldn't I, since I am using a DELL OEM CD, just extract the product key from a manually installed machine and use that alone? The OEM disc should automatically compliment it with those four files correct?

I assume migrate.inf is referenced during install and not a config file I could copy an altered version of right after?

So where I work we have many Dell machines and some of them are XP Home (we have lots of older machines). I am in charge of redeploying the OS to each machine when necessary. I have figured out a way (using sysprep) to do this just fine, but I have hit a major snag. Basically what happens is when I install XP Pro I would normally use the master keys listed here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457078.aspx But I cannot find an analog for XP Home (or even Vista/7, which I'm sure I will have to worry about eventually). As it is I have to go to each machine and enter the product key from the coa on the side. I would like to find a master key to preserve the per-activated state. Any suggestions?

So I need to run unattended installs on some OEM machines I have and I am bound by a couple rules: 1) The machines must be loaded from an original OEM disc (aka NO slipstreaming) 2) The install must be completely unattended I basically have everything working except for one small problem. My setup consists of 4 things: 1) Hard Drive (wiped and not formatted) 2) Optical Drive (OEM install CD) 3) Floppy Drive (hosts winnt.inf and a couple other config files) 4) USB Key (hosts ethernet drivers for the different systems I will encounter) Basically I wipe the HDD so it skips the "Press any key..." prompt. It will then proceed and do an unattended install just fine. The problem comes when I actually get into windows, the HDD is drive E: (in most cases) and my USB is drive C:. I'm not well versed on letter assigning, but I think it has something to do with the HDD not being formatted, and the USB is seen and assigned prior to the HDD. What I need is a solution that will let me use my current setup, but wind up with my HDD being C: and no software issues if I have to change from E: to C: post-install. I would really like to find a way to circumvent the press any key prompt and have the HDD as C:. Thanks