OK, my bad - I was not explaining my problem thoroughly: the manual processing starts right at the beginning, as in my unattended file was not being read. Sure enough, I have it in the wrong directory. Fixed that and all the automation is now working. It still stops, though, when trying to format the partition. Still says disk is damaged, blah blah blah, install Windows on a different partition. Edit: I got it to work! My setup directory was called 'Windows XP Pro', so I tried removing the spaces from it, calling it 'WindowsXP_Pro'. Made the according change in txtsetup.sif, for the sourcepath: and viola! it worked.