Halal-Al

FYI: DELL's D600 BIOS executables has a hidden parameter: If you start the BIOS executable with the -nopause switch it asks no questions, gives no warnings, it just does it. E.g. D600_A15.EXE -nopause will launch the BIOS upgrade, kill all running apps, reboot Windows and perform the actual upgrade and then reboot again after completion. So you might want to warn your users or even log them off before running this remotely through fx. SMS I tested it on DELL D600, I'm not sure it will work with other DELL flash BIOS executables. You can test it by draging the exe into a notepad and search for the word '-nopause'. If it's there, it will probably work.

I ain't got a clue. Why Dell's own driver pack doesn't work with Dell's WS370 when their BIOS is set to 'RAID Autodetect'? Their problem. I just wanted to share my experience, so some other poor devil didn't have to waste time on it. I'll leave that up to the Dell support guys and be happy it works for me. And hopefully for somebody else as well. B)

HeY A cool 'fan', nice Yes LEGO is a cool toy, but u should buy some more, we're not doing to well. Anyway, we are using the txtsetup.oem method as described on the Intel page(see my first post). It's working fine when the BIOS is set to 'RAID ON' and I had a long chat with a DELL support guy who ended up asking ME for the unattend.txt file that worked... It follows the Intel outline, but u can get it here [Unattended] UnattendedMode=FullUnattended OEMSkipEULA=YES OEMPreInstall=YES OEMPnPDriversPath=\PnPDrvrs\System;\PnPDrvrs\Monitors;\PnPDrvrs;\PnPDrvrs\ialmnt5;\PnPDrvrs\DivaPro;\PnPDrvrs\Video WaitForReboot=No TargetPath=WINNT OverWriteOemFilesOnUpgrade=no DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore [GUIUnattended] AdminPassword="*" EncryptedAdminPassword=NO OEMSkipRegional=1 OEMSkipWelcome=1 TimeZone=105 ProfilesDir="%SystemRoot%\Profiles" [Userdata] ProductID=11111-11111-11111-11111 Fullname="." OrgName="LEGO Company" ComputerName=DKL366 [Display] BitsPerPel=16 Xresolution=1024 YResolution=768 VRefresh=70 [RegionalSettings] LanguageGroup=1,2,7,8 SystemLocale=00000409 UserLocale=00000406 InputLocale=0409:00000409, 0406:00000406, 0411:e0010411, 0412:E0010412, 0407:00000407 [Identification] JoinDomain=domain.lego.com DomainAdmin=<username> DomainAdminPassword=<passWord> MachineObjectOU="ou = ou_DESKTOP2003,ou = ou_DEV,ou = ou_legopc,dc = domain,dc = lego,dc = com" [NetWorking] InstallDefaultComponents=YES [Components] msmq_Core=on zonegames=Off msnexplr=Off [MassStorageDrivers] "Intel(R) 82801FR SATA RAID Controller (Desktop ICH6R)" = "OEM" [OEMBootFiles] iaStor.inf iaStor.sys iaStor.cat iaAHCI.inf iaAHCI.cat Txtsetup.oem It's the last two sections that's interesting. We then added the driver files to the $OEM$\TEXTMODE folder. On the WinPE side I modified the WinPEOEM.sif to include these lines: [OemDriverParams] OemDriverRoot="" OemDriverDirs=IAStor And then added a folder in System32 called IAStor and added all the files from the driver pack. That's it. It works.

Well, here at LEGO Company, we don't use unattend WinXP CDs, we have all our WinXP setup files on network shares and we connect to the share with unattended WinPE CD, RIS or even network enabled DOS boot disk! So yes, unattended installation is known to us.

That will be XP Pro, SP1, latest hotfixes and the driver pack are directly as downloaded from Dell. Plus the latest BIOS version from Dell (A03)

Just a quick hint I've been having some problems with a Dell Precision Workstation with Intel® Application Accelerator RAID Edition. It turns out that I can get the drivers I downloaded from Dell to work ONLY if I set the Sata Operations in BIOS to RAID ON. If I choose any of the RAID Autodetect options I get errors. Even when using F6 during setup. Otherwise it's setup as described here: Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition

We (IT@LEGO Company) use a vbscript for that: Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Dim disk, drive wscript.echo "Deleting primary disk" WshShell.Run "diskpart /s DelAndCreate.txt", 7, TRUE 'Delete all partitions, create one primary, assign letter C: WshShell.Run "format c: /fs:ntfs /v:temp /q /y", 7, TRUE Set Drive = fso.GetDrive(fso.GetDriveName(fso.GetAbsolutePathName("C:\"))) Disk = FormatNumber(Drive.TotalSize /1048576, 0,0,0,0) 'Now we know the max size of the disk. 'DISKMIN is the minimum size in GB 'DISKUSE is the minimum procentage of the disk to use 'The highest of the two wins DISKMIN=5 DISKUSE=50 'Set disksize to minimum 5Gb, but use half the actual max disk size (50%) 'or... DISKMIN=5 DISKUSE=0 'Set disksize to 5Gb wscript.echo "Setting the partition size of primary disk." Dim ValueDISKMIN, ValueDISKUSE, partsize If Not DISKMIN = "" Then wscript.echo "DISKMIN=" & diskmin & "GB" ValueDISKMIN = DISKMIN * 1024 End If If (Not DISKUSE = "") and (Not DISKUSE = "(NONE)") Then wscript.echo "DISKUSE=" & diskuse ValueDISKUSE = Disk * (DISKUSE / 100) Else ValueDISKUSE = Disk End If If ValueDISKMIN > Disk then ValueDISKMIN = Disk If ValueDISKMIN > ValueDISKUSE then partsize = ValueDISKMIN else partsize = ValueDISKUSE end if partsize = partsize - 5 partsize = "Size=" & partsize '*************************** ' Modify DISKPART-File '*************************** wscript.echo "Modifying DISKPART input file to " & partsize fso.copyfile "diskpart_template.txt", "disktmp.txt" sTMP = "Diskmain.txt" sTXT = "disktmp.txt" Set input = fso.OpenTextFile(sTXT, 1) Set output = fso.CreateTextFile(sTMP, True) While Not input.AtEndOfStream sOneLine = input.ReadLine sOneLine = Replace(sOneLine, "##SIZE", partsize) output.WriteLine(sOneLine) Wend input.Close output.Close fso.DeleteFile sTXT Set input = Nothing Set output = Nothing ' *********************** ' Partitioning disk 0 * ' *********************** wscript.echo "Now partitioning primary disk." WshShell.Run "diskpart /s diskmain.txt", 7, TRUE WshShell.Run "format c: /fs:ntfs /v:System /q /y", 7, TRUE The DelAndCreate.txt should look something like this: sel disk 0 clean Cre par pri sel par 1 assign letter=c exit And the diskpart_template.txt like this: sel disk 0 sel par 1 del par Cre par pri ##SIZE sel par 1 assign letter=c exit The above code is a cutout of the scripts we use, and not tested alone, but I hope you can use this.