^eMpTy^

lets say u hv 1000 employees and u shout on the PA system James pls come to my office, how many james do u think will go to your office. I am sure statistically more than 1. simply it is to avoid conflict with other drivers that also use the same NAME for the filename. how many of the drivers have the same name? and it won't avoid conflict other than identically named files since windows scans all of the directories no matter what...

My apologies upfront if this has been discussed elsewhere before. I see from Bashrat's driver packs the two methods available for integrating drivers into my windows xp cd. Method one works very well but takes up too much space. And method 2 works very well, but may potentially invoke windows file protection errors. So neither method has me perfectly satisfied right now. (I can't disable the protection because my boss thinks it's a bad idea) I was thinking, aren't all the drivers that come with windows already compressed? And why can't we just toss our driver packs in the same cab files? Obviously this would probably also trigger a windows file protection error. But I was poking around and I looked in DRVINDEX.INF which indexes all the drivers on the standard cd. It has two sections, "driver" and "SP2". At the bottom there is a section marked "Cabs" and it lists the two filenames of the cab files that contain the drivers for the respective sections: driver.cab and sp2.cab. I was wondering, what would happen if you just tossed a third section in there labeled "bts" (for bashrat the sneaky) and added a new cab file full of all your drivers? EDIT: Most importantly, you could in theory make as many cab files as you wanted, so it would also alleviate the problem of like-named files... If this worked you'd have all the files compressed on the cd to take up much less space but without having to fool around decompressing the files yourself. Also if you upgrade a network or sound card later the drivers will still be on the hard drive and windows will search through them when you add a new component (since windows setup copies driver.cab and sp2.cab to your hard drive). Again, sorry if this has come up before, I'm just really interested in all this unattended cd creation stuff and I can't stop my brain from coming up with ways to try to make it better.

is there any reason all the drivers have to be in their own directory? I realize for maintenance purposes it's probably easier...so you would still want to have a copy of the driver pack all separated into folders for neatness, but when you add it to the cd, why can't you just dump them all in one folder? or if some of the filenames overlap, as many folders as is necessary?

it doesn't work in firefox...presumably because the search loads in another window...

sorry, for some reason the search function doesn't work at all for me...and I've been reading through and haven't seen any reference to the topic... my bad...

is there a way to just dump the contents of the cd on the hard drive and then start the install from the hard drive? i.e., make your own utility that runs from the cd and gives you all kinds of options for the install (computer name, what to install, what to tweak, etc.), then copies all the contents of the cd to the hard drive (maybe does the partitioning as well) adds all the selected settings to the appropriate files (winnt.sif, a selection of different registry tweaks etc) and then start the setup from the hard drive? it seems like this would be a good idea since it would give you a lot more versatility with one cd, and it would also give you a lot more room on the cd since you could archive absolutely EVERYTHING... does this sound like a good idea to anyone else? or do I need sleep?

thanks for the help!

Well I realize that it's corrupted...I'm just wondering WHY it's corrupted...as an interim solution I followed the instructions to just delete the text altogether... I would like the text to be there because I'm trying to keep the installation as professional-looking as possible... Here's my winntbbu.dl_ Anyone have any idea why it would do this? Has everyone that changed the background also deleted the text as well?

Here's the screenshot. Like I said, I'm not doing anything wierd, I followed the guide to the letter, and the propaganda got cut off...I figured it would be a common problem but I guess not. Here's what I did step-by-step. Opened winntbbu.dll from my xpcd\i386 directory with resedit. Selected bitmap003. Hit the replace button. Selected my new image. Hit the save button. Clicked "Yes" when prompted to save the file back to its original location. As soon as I clicked yes, I went to the strings section and the text had visibly changed from arial to courier, and the text had been cut off. Using JCarle's program, I confirmed that the text had been corrupted. Thanks for taking a look at this.

I'm at my home computer and I can't get you a screenshot since I'm doing this project from work... It's really simple, the text just stops. Right in mid-word. It happens right around the end of the fourth line on every page. All I've done is replace the image with resedit or whatever. The moment I change the image, the text gets cut off...I can see it in resedit as well...

anyone? any idea why my text is being cut off?

I made a new background just fine with photoshop and resbuild. But now my text seems to get cut off short, like about after the first paragraph. Any idea why that would happen? I made no attempt to edit the text. Also, is there a way to control the resolution at which this screen shows up? -eMpTy

I am trying to do it with registry hacks...we'll see how it goes...

So I've had some issues with adding to a domain when I do my unattended setup. For some reason driver installations seemed to stop working when I set it to add to my domain automatically...and it didn't even add itself to the domain. Does anyone know of any issues like this? Anyone have much experience with domains? Another question: Ideally I would like to bring my computers up, install network drivers, run some registry tweaks to disable dhcp media sense, and then join or add the computer to a domain. With that done, I'd like to use this dsmove.exe tool to change the organizational unit my computers are in in active directory then reboot them so my software installation policies can kick in and install all the default software on the domain. (This way it stays up to date, is contained in one spot, and doesn't fill up the cd) My problems are: since I couldn't get the unattended setup to join the domain properly (admittedly I didn't try that hard) I enlisted the help of netdom.exe which performs the task via command line. Then I need to restart the computer and get it to login using the domain administrator account...still working on that part. Here's the clincher, if I were to get the unattended cd to add to the domain itself, would I still need to log on to the domain to make the active directory changes...so... Anyone have similar problems with domain logon? And does anyone know how to auto-login to the domain? -eMpTy

I'm an id***...my issue is resolved, it worked the first time I just didn't properly apply the change to my cd image. Thanks for they help!

Now I have removed reference to all sound card drivers except the S\SM\I (I assume I for intel) and then I'm adding the drivers specifically for my board from the asus website...let's see how that goes...

just use the search function in Notepad: search for: Drivers\SM replace with: Drivers\S\SM I'm working on the update. That's precisely what I did and I still got a bsod. I have a p4p800-se with the latest bios revision. I also tried removing reference to the RealTek drivers, that didn't work either...any other ideas?

missing entry points? you mean the typo? as in change \SM to \S\SM? Can someone just paste a working path list? I'm on my fourth CD-R now and I haven't fixed the issue yet. TIA -eMpTy

So did you guys ever settle on a way to resolve this? Does killing the \R directory ALWAYS work? Since this is my first post let me say thanks to Bashrat for the truely impressive work on the driver packs. I'm amazed by the effort you have put into this project.