advocate_hf

indeed, i had to disable 1394 (firewire) in the BIOS too....

Funny you should say that, was going to try it last nigth but totally forgot!! I'll give it a go later and feedback the results....

Weird, It doesnt work when on my Attache PNY 8GB Vista ready USB thumb drive either. Dont think it has anything to do with the 'type' of usb drive and in essence why would it? I have tried it on two different mobo's and my lappy and guess what? Neither pass the autounattend.xml, this is very strange. Shame you cant produce some sort of debug log when installing..... Or can you????

Not sure how this would solve my problem. There is no issue with me booting from the external drive, just that the autounattend.xml is not used throughout the install even it is in the root of the usb drive. I understand that vista processes the autounattend.xml using a specific search order and if you booted a vista dvd with a flash drive plugged in that has the autounattend.xml, Vista would see this and use it. The prob is, I am not using the DVD just a USB HD with the install files and the autounattend.xml. Any ideas? thanks.

Hi Can someone please explain to me why when after I copy the entire contents of a v-lite'd Vista image to a bootable external HD/Flash drive and attempt to Install Vista from it, the autounattend.xml is not passed and Vista prompts me as normal? The autounattend.xml is what v-lite generated and is in the ROOT of the bootable USB HD. Nuhi, I remember reading a comment from you some time ago regarding a similar prob, was it ever resolved? thanks for all your help, Adv.