RogueSpear

Take a look in the Registry Tweaks sticky topic in this forum. Download the latest tweaks file and go through it. Most of what you want to accomplish can be found there. And IMHO importing reg tweaks is a bit more straight forward than using .ins files.

Doesn't bother me any. Your instructive posts are by far the best AutoIt learning tool that I have available. I always do well learning by example (with explanations of course).

Try doing IPCONFIG /ALL from a command prompt to get the MAC address. Alternatively, you could go to the DHCP snapin and look at the leases to find it.

You've already gotten much further than me I'll try to test it all out over the weekend.

Maybe you'll have better luck than me, but I tried to make two seperate installers - one for SPTD and one for the DT app itself. It failed miserably. I can't document it, but I'm thinking the two installs are more intertwined than what it appears. The random generation of the driver filename is tied to the Daemon Tools install somehow.

Unless Microsoft revs MSN Messenger 7.5 again, which isn't a certainty, I won't be updating the installer with the newer Messenger Plus! version. It's a nothing of an upgrade practically.

If this is a PE install, presumable to fix broken computers, I don't see where you're going to need to put a file greater than 4GB in there. If that's absolutely necessary, make another partion and format that as NTFS. Then access it once you're up and running in PE.

.NET 1.1 installs just fine from svcpack.inf and .NET 2.0 needs to be installed from either GuiRunOnce or RunOnceEx. You can find installers in the thread linked in my signature for switchless silent installers. Works every time for me and has been for quite a while now.

If you inspect the setup log found in %systemroot%, you'll find out an awful lot about what happens when during setup. It's been a while since I've looked one over because I seem to have this down now, but as an example, auto activation happens during the GUI portion of the setup. It's way towards the end of the log file, so I don't think it would be an indication of availability during svcpack.inf or cmdlines.txt, but the network for an install is configured rather early on. I'd test out what I posted earlier in here, but I'm in the middle of about 10 other things right now.

I second 5eraph. What he put down has always worked for me.

Make a file, pingthis.cmd that has one single line: ping www.yahoo.com Run it from svcpack.inf or cmdlines.txt.

Well I must admit that I am out of my element in regards to Via hardware and that I have not downloaded and inspected the hwid files you posted. After a few consecutive nightmares with Via equipped mobos I swore them off completely about three years ago. I think that some of the Via drivers (chipset maybe) are behind in the driver packs as Via has revved them recently. Perhaps the next DP mass storage will take care of the problem.

I went to the web page for the company that makes the pass through driver to see what I could find there which might be helpful to our cause. Holy cow, talk about a nothing of a web site. You can hardly even tell what line of business they're in. @Swimming_bird, generally speaking a script, be it AutoIt or any other scripting language, can be very simple or very complex "looking". A lot of times, scripts that appear long in print just have a lot of error checking in them so they can appropriately react to as many different scenarios as possible. The error checking code, depending on what it needs to do can indeed be complex or simply very long. Depends on the situation.

Using my Gigabyte motherboard as an example, it has an integrated Promise controller that is functionally the same as a model you could buy off the shelf. I don't remember the model off the top of my head. As it turns out this is also the same controller that Maxtor rebranded and included with some of their hard drives when ATA-133 was a new technology. Well even though these controllers use the identical controlling chip and logic, for whatever reason Promise decided they needed to have their own HWID. In another move that really baffles me, when you download drivers from Promise themselves, they may not include the HWIDs for rebranded and OEM integrated controllers. It really makes no sense to me, but Promise is not alone in doing this either. ATI has done this with video controllers in laptops as well. So this is one of the biggest difficulties with ensuring that the driver packs work with all possible hardware. When you multiply the number of hardware manufacurers who do this by the number motherboard makers, laptop manufacturers, etc. it really becomes a problem of sheer number.

Update - 20060105 Updated Ethereal to V0.10.14 Updated FileZilla to V2.2.18 Updated KeePass Password Safe to V1.04 Updated SpywareBlaster to V3.5.1 Repacked .NET V1.1 and V2.0 and Visual J# V1.1 and V2.0 The .NET Framework installs are back. If anyone downloaded the .NET V2.0 between January 01 and today, you will need to redownload. I accidentally omitted inserting a reboot suppression. The Visual J# V1.1 package I originally posted back in November was, to my surprise, not an AIP based install. I don't know what I was thinking when I did that, but now the install is based on an AIP and this cut the filesize of the installer in half. Also it seems a bug must have been resolved with 7-Zip because I can now compress at the maximum setting without receiving an error, so this saved a little space on the .NET and J# installers. I am now branding my installers. When you look at the comments meta data for the installer, it will read "A RogueSpear Repack". If you see this in a file, then there is a good chance I actually made it. Obviously someone could make their own installer and make the comments read whatever they like, so don't read into this as some form of checksum or authenticity verification, because it is not. @JoeDorson, any time! @Gedrean, my Addon Pack needs to be integrated into your Windows XP install source using either nLite or RyanVM's Integrator. The switchless silent installers and the .msi files, for those using group policy, that are in this thread were made on and tested on Windows XP SP2. Some of them may work with earlier versions of Windows, but I suspect some won't. The target audience are those who are installing Windows XP SP2.

I had the same problem with a Gigabyte motherboard that has a Promise controller integrated. Like you, I reported the HWIDs to BTS and by the next version it was working for me. Clearly problematic? Depends on how you look at it. DP Mass Storage does what it's intended to do. The large diversity in hardware out there makes it rather difficult to assemble a complete collection of HWIDs. BTS does a rather admirable job of including all that he can, but he does to some degree depend on users of the Driver Pack's to report missing HWIDs. Blame the hardware manufacturers. There's just no legitamate excuse for some of these companies needing to have dozens, if not hundreds, of seperate HWIDs for what is only a handful of unique products.

If you're going to perform a relatively "vanilla" Windows XP installation - that is without SP2 integrated or driver integration - then I would suggest disabling the RealTek sound adapter in the BIOS before installing the operating system. After you have updated to SP2 and KB888111 has been installed, then shutdown and re-enable the sound adapter. Hopefully then the driver installation will go as expected. It seems that if SP2/KB888111 are not directly integrated into the source, all kinds of problems crop up.

BTS made an announcement (in the Driver Pack General forum) after his exams were finished that he would be taking time off. And I believe the time off was mostly to work on a new version of the slipstreamer. If the issue isn't directly addressed by the new slipstreamer, I'm sure he will directly reply to this thread when he is able to do so.

If you download AutoRIS (even the "lite" version), you'll get working Marvell drivers for RIS. I personally modified the .INF and tested them. Well not so much tested as I HAD to get them working for a job. Short story is that they're there for the taking. Use the link in my signature. @Cluberti, at least Marvell NICs are "RISable" in contrast to the utter and total failure I had in getting a SiS motherboard integrated NIC to even perform a PXE boot. It even said in a flashy colorful splash "PXE 2.0 Compliant!" And while I don't have any personal experience with them, it's to my understanding that nForce NICs are somewhere between difficult and impossible to use with RIS.

V1.50 - 12/31/2005 - AutoRIS settings are now retrieved from an .ini file, AutoRIS.ini. - More and better error checking and handling. - Deleting the default .SIF file, RISTNDRD.SIF, is now an option (set in AutoRIS.ini). - Updated existing NIC drivers, and added support for Broadcom NICs. - Integrating additional NIC drivers is now an option (set in AutoRIS.ini). - VMware or VirtualPC, if present will be launched automatically after the BINL service is restarted on the RIS server. - nLite is now automatically launched. - Final compression of .INF and .PNF file is now optional. - AutoRIS now indicated that it is terminating both at the completion of processing and when it encounters path errors. - A "Full" version of AutoRIS is now available for download. This version includes support for cmdlines.txt, RunOnceEx, automatic integration of .NET runtimes, and more. This is a rather significant upgrade. I wasn't able to implement a GUI inteface, but I'm not sure it matters that much. Looking in hindsight at how huge the full version is. I will probably bust that up in future into individual parts. For instance all four of the .NET installers and the VMware Tools installer are available at my installer thread (in my signature). You would just have to rename the files so that the scripts work with them appropriately. As always, let me know about problems... Happy New Year everyone.

12/31/2005 nLite V1.0 RC4 tested and works. XPize V4.2 tested and works. Added a download link to additional NIC drivers w/ RIS specific .INF files. All of the scripts have been updated and are now downloadable. This guide will only be minimally updated going forward. At this point it's really for educational purposes more than anything. With AutoRIS reaching V1.5, the entire procedure has become fully automatic and practically bomb proof. You would have to be nuts to go through all this manually now.

The best thing to do for GPO deployment is to make .mst tranform files and then select "Advanced" instead of "Assigned" when you add a new .msi file to a GPO. Selecting advanced will allow you to go to the "Modifications" tab and then browse for the .mst file. If you don't have access to something along the lines of InstallShield AdminStudio (there's a 30 trial) or Wise Package Studio, you could always download the Microsoft Office 2003 Resource Kit Tools (free) and use the Custom Installation Wizard. This isn't really an officially sanctioned use of that product, but it does get the job done. If this is something you see youself doing on a frequent, or at least regular, basis I would suggest hitting your employer up for a premium software package like AdminStudio. There are some other free tools out there, most of which I have not tried, but if you do a little creative Googling you'll find plenty to chose from. One concept to keep in mind is this. Almost any command line option you see demonstrated here in the forums, like SERIALNUMBER=1234-5678-0123-4567, is really an entry in the .msi file's table. So instead of using the command line option, which is perfectly suitable for batch file use, you could either modify the .msi file directly OR make an .mst file which is "applied" to the .msi file dynamically at the time of installation. The latter option is considered to be best practice since you're not actually modifying the .msi file itself. I ditched the best practices a while ago and just started to do direct .msi file modification. I'm not saying it's right or better, just saying it's an option.

No, svcpack.inf has really become the preferred time of installation for software. Of course some software cannot be installed from there, and for those RunOnceEx is the way to go.

I've tested RC4 with RVM 2.0.1, Ryan's WMP 10 addon, and my own addon pack and everything went smooth here.

Anybody got feedback as to whether or not these drivers are getting any better or not?