alexlomas

Of course - I think I may just stick with our current WinPE and run ImageX from within that, rather than doing a full unattended each time.

Aaaaah, ok - time for a lab deployment first I think. Cheers all!

At the moment we use RIS (and emboot) to boot WinPE 2005 into RAM before initiating the unattended install by using a PE ISO along side the ntdetect.com, ntldr, startrom.com & winnt.sif files in the "templates" directory. When I try the same approach with Vista, it doesn't work (it loads the image into RAM and then throws an error "missing or error in txtsetup.sif" - or something similar). The same ISO file loads fine if I burn it to a CD. Any hints? TIA!

Yes, I've come across this exact same problem across a wide range of different hardware/NIC types. My organisation uses a PXE (network) boot setup, but the principle is exactly the same as using a CD with winnt.sif. Having had a look at the setup logs of a few machines that have failed, it seems to be that Windows Setup tries to join a workgroup or domain with a duplicate name (COMPUTERNAME in our case). Windows setup doesn't like this, then tries to create a random name instead (like sysprep does), it's at this point that it reboots and ends up in an endless cycle. The simple workaround seems to be to ensure that winnt.sif makes reference to a unique name on the network. It does seem to be a bug in the new SP2 setup procedure - I haven't yet come across anything from MS that reports anything similar though. HTH