SmokingRope

I'm doing unattended installations using a usb key now. I pull the usb key out as soon as files finish copying so i cant use this DVDROOT tweak. Instead i copy the UnattendedOOBE.xml file into the wim image in a folder C:\Settings\UnattendedOOBE.xml My commandline actually looks as follows: C:\Windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /quiet /oobe /reboot /generalize /unattend:C:\Settings\UnattendedOOBE.xml I tried to reproduce the error on a Virtual Box virtual machine but installation worked fine. Hopefully i can find some time to try this on VMWare Server 2 next. Did you include that task kill command because you saw the same errors i was seeing?

I have found that sometimes when running on a virtual machine, setup will fail with the popup like shown below: The error happens after running the command: C:\Windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /quiet /oobe /reboot /generalize /unattend:%DVDRoot%\UnattendedOOBE.xml When this command runs, it tries to copy the UnattendedOOBE.xml file to C:\Windows\Panther directory with the name autounattend.xml. For some reason it fails to copy the file. It seems to ignore the fact that the file failed to copy. It will then try and load the autounattend.xml from C:\Windows\Panther, but it will be the old one instead of the new one. You will also find the old one has been modified during the setup process already, marking it as having already been run. Because the stages have already been run, sysprep will not execute it again (it would go into an infinite loop of applying registry tweaks / generalizing / rebooting if it did run it again). So instead, it opens the prompt shown in screenshot above. This same problem does not happen when run on a physical machine, so it may be that it doesn't work in your virtual machine but it does work on phsyical ones. As a workaround, you can manually copy or hand-edit the unattend file to match UnattendedOOBE.xml and then execute the command again from a command prompt. Setup will complete as normal. NOTE: I will try and remember to pull the lines from the sysprep.log next time i see this happen and place them here.

Zilexa - it sounds like you know as much as I do about this now. As far as i am aware it is safe to keep the auditUser / specialize / windowsPE passes in UnattendedOOBE.xml - i think it's equally safe to remove them.

The order the passes run is something like: 1) windows PE 2) oobeSystem (reboot here) 3) specialize 4) audit user (reboot here - from last command) 5) oobeSystem again with UnattendedOOBE.xml During auditUser the environment is setup, and programs can run just like they would after setup is finished. Input *could* be provided during auditUser pass but if you set up command-lines right then no input is necessary. You just have to remove a few lines from UnattendedOOBE.xml (the reseal part) - process reboots from auditUser directly into OOBESystem step so it doesn't matter what you have in the other passes. <Reseal> <Mode>Audit</Mode> </Reseal> As for the note about the WIM, i can't say that it will affect you but it has caused a lot of headaches for me while doing this. I always slipstream hotfixes and put the applications i am installing in the WIM and if you don't rebuild the index (or whatever it's called, haven't done it recently) then during setup, sysPrep fails to load the UnattendedOOBE.xml and you end up having to click through the boxes in step #5 above and registry settings are not applied because *generalize* didn't take place. It takes an hour to get to this point inside a virtual machine so it's a pain to debug / test (I probably have wasted days on the issue). The actual solution was found serendipitously and the only thing i know is that it seems to work. EDIT: Rebuilding the WIM: it might be helpful to grab the error codes from the UnattendedGC.log / Panther.log files and put them in this thread somewhere for search engines to pickup. Will see about doing this if I have time.

I got the impression he believed audit mode was a manual process as is suggested by most of the tutorials on tech republic. Using copy profile as described, audit mode is applied inline during installation and is completely unattended. You can throw your apps on your dvd / usb stick and install your apps directly from there without changing the unattended process at all. It is the equivalent of the old windows XP procedure.

I am installing regtweaks during setup on my unattended usb key. Most of my information for doing this came from the FireGier guide for vista. To summarize, You will need two copies of your unattended file, these two files only need to differ by one setting. AutoUnattend.xml will have this line, second file (UnattendedOOBE.xml for remainder of this discussion) does not have this setting. I usually setup autounattend.xml and as a last step before copying to usb key create the UnattendedOOBE.xml from the autounattend.xml <settings pass="oobeSystem"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Deployment"> <Reseal> <Mode>Audit</Mode> </Reseal> </component> </settings> This will cause setup to boot into sysprep mode. You need to put a command to run during auditUser that will , generalize, capture the image, reboot the system back into OOBE and have it use UnattendedOOBE.xml config instead of autounattend.xml. This needs to be the very last command executed (as the system reboots afterwards). <settings pass="auditUser"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Deployment"> <RunSynchronous> <RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action="add"> <Order>500</Order> <Description>Reboot into OOBE With Unattend lacking reseal</Description> <Path>C:\Windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /quiet /oobe /reboot /generalize /unattend:%DVDRoot%\UnattendedOOBE.xml</Path> </RunSynchronousCommand> </RunSynchronous> </component> </settings> During sysprep mode, system will be running as administrative user, to make those settings apply to the default user profile you need to put a setting into specialize pass <settings pass="specialize"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup"> <CopyProfile>true</CopyProfile> </component> </settings> To get the %DVDRoot% I just search the drive letters looking for the UnattendedOOBE.xml file in the root directory: (I run this command both in auditUser and specialize passes but i'm not sure whether that's really necessary) <RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action="add"> <Order>497</Order> <Path>cmd /c "FOR %i IN (C D E F G H I J K L N M O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) DO IF EXIST %i:\UnattendedOOBE.xml SETX DVDRoot %i: -m"</Path> <Description>Set Path For DVD</Description> </RunSynchronousCommand> Other things to note: After making changes to the wim (e.g after mount / unmount commit) files, you need to open it up in WSIM and let it rebuild the indexes or whatever, it feels a lot like black-magic but this has fixed several of my problems with rebooting the system using UnattendedOOBE.xml Registry tweaks are applied through .reg files during auditUser pass running command: REGEDIT /s C:\MyRegistryTweaks.reg Installing apps during auditUser means those apps are available to any account in the system... Hopefully i captured all the relevant steps here, you can refer to the firegeier guide if you run into any issues though.

Wow, DISM is very slick. I wish i had known about it a couple months ago when i made my first unattend.

I'd like to integrate drivers directly into the install.wim using imagex and perhaps other WAIK tools. I've downloaded these drivers from the windows update catalog and would like the driver installed in such a way that windows update will not request the driver be downloaded again. I have read the tutorial for doing this in the firegierer unattended guide but not tested it because of the following statement: Has anyone used such a method and is the statement above true? If so is anyone aware of another way i can achieve similar results? I do not want to start from a fresh image each time i need to integrate a new or updated driver into the installation image.

I have played around with this for a while now, i figure someone else might be interested in the results: Create a new WSH Script (which is very similar to that from the link posted by op). (http://blogs.technet.com/deploymentguys/ar...via-script.aspx) My script (stored at C:\PinToTaskbar.vbs) looks as follows: Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") set filesystem = CreateObject("scripting.Filesystemobject") Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(filesystem.GetParentFolderName(Wscript.Arguments(0))) Set objFolderItem = objFolder.ParseName(filesystem.GetFileName(WScript.Arguments(0))) Set colVerbs = objFolderItem.Verbs For Each objVerb in colVerbs If Replace(objVerb.name, "&", "") = "Pin to Taskbar" Then objVerb.DoIt If Replace(objVerb.name, "&", "") = "Unpin from Taskbar" Then objVerb.DoIt Next Create ONE batch file (at C:\PinItemsToTaskbar.bat) which then executes the above WSH script using cscript.exe for each program you want to pin. "C:\Windows\System32\cscript.exe" "C:\PinToTaskbar.vbs" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\cscript.exe" "C:\PinToTaskbar.vbs" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\VISIO.exe" "C:\Windows\System32\cscript.exe" "C:\PinToTaskbar.vbs" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.exe" Create a registry script (at C:\PinOnce.reg) which will execute the above batch file at first logon for each user. Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce] "SetupTaskbarPins"="C:\\PinItemsToTaskbar.bat" Now load this registry file during your unattended installation within the auditUser pass before generalization (or however else you might try and do it) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend"> <settings pass="auditUser"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Deployment" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <RunSynchronous> <RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action="add"> <Order>500</Order> <Path>cmd /c "REGEDIT /s C:\PinOnce.reg"</Path> <Description>Load User Settings</Description> </RunSynchronousCommand> </RunSynchronous> </component> </settings> </unattend> I have tried unsuccessfully, to execute the WSH script during the auditUser pass using a RunSynchronous command. I Have tried unsuccessfully to execute the WSH script using the OOBE FirstLogonCommand. I have tried setting the FirstLogonCommand parameter "RequiresUserInput" to both true and false. I then tried to bypass the "PinItemsToTaskbar.bat" file by placing all the pin commands into the registry RunOnce; however it appears that the WSH script cannot be run multiple times simultaneously, and this caused unpredictable things to happen. The above steps are only method i have successfully used to pin items to the taskbar.

After following instructions in this article, CopyProfile seems to be working perfectly for me. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289)

I managed to back up the toolbar settings of my taskbar using the registry keys below. I found them using Regmon and with it you should be able to find some large list of keys which potentially store the information you're looking for. Just start the tool, make a change to the setting you want to back up, and then pick out which keys were changed from the log. [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\0] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\1] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\10] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\11] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\12] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\13] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\14] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\15] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\16] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\17] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\18] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\19] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\2] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\20] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\21] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\22] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\23] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\24] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\25] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\26] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\27] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\28] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\29] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\3] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\30] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\4] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\5] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\6] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\7] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\8] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\9] [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop]

This is not related to drivers. It is a direct result of using the 'networking' section of nLite's remove components wizard, as was that topic of my previous post. I was attempting to address additional 'symptoms' that might help in finding and fixing the bug that was the topic of my previous two posts. Preset Is In Progress ( i didn't save them after i figured it out )

I have spent hours shamelessly reinstalling on a virtual machine and have 'isolated' this problem. When using the remove components (wizard?), i could reproduce this issue when selecting arbitrary components in the 'network' subtree. In the following two test cases , there was no single option (aside from the network subtree itself) which was the culprit. I ran these test cases with a directory containing windows xp SP2 and all the critical hotfixes for it integrated by nLite. (up to this month) I have reproduced the problem with 2 test cases, once i exclusively selected to remove 'MSN Explorer'. In a second attempt i selected a variety of features while excluding MSN explorer. comtrol test terminal program frontpage extensions iis netmeeting peer-to-peer windows messenger You can see the effects by running 'services.msc' and looking for the standard services 'COM+ Event System' and 'COM+ System Application'. You can also try opening the run dialog and typing calc or calc.exe. Could this issue be resolved for the next release please? Edit: there are a couple more things i have noticed that might be useful if i include calc.exe in the 'don't remove' setting, it will be there after installation when the installer completes and windows loads for the first time, the virtual machine always initializes to a 640x480 resolution instead of (my winnt.sif default) 1024x768

After using the remove components portion of nlite, services and applications i haven't asked nlite to remove are gone, things like the 'Com+ event system' service and calc.exe are the ones causing me the most problems. There could be more. I've tried this twice now with RC2, and i've had the same issue with 1.3 and 1.4RC1 in the past Is this a known issue, is there anything i could be doing wrong?

Using nLite 1.4 RC1 After i run the reduction portion of nLite a number of important services and applications disappear. The most notable of these is 'com+ event system' and calc.exe why are these things removed? Edit: I realized quickly after making this post that RC2 was released. I haven't tried it yet, but you can delete this post i believe.

I don't really want to change any of the permissions, i actually just want them to stay the same across installations. Right now, when i reinstall, all the folder permissions disapear. I want for example, 'D:\games' to be readable by only the 'Games' user and 'D:\homework' to be accessible by only my 'smokingrope' user. I may be able to do something with the default security groups to accomplish this but it would be contrived. There must be some way to either replace the old SID's with the new ones just after installation, or tell the installer the SID to use for each of my users. I would guess that the former would be easy enough, however writing a script or custom app is just not an option for me right now. I have found NewSID. It looks to be too specialized for my needs. I have started reading about the sysprep utility and hope that it can help in accomplishing my goal.

So if i interpret this correctly i could setup access control based on certain groups that are predefined. looking through defltwk.inf i found groups like: Administrators Users Guests power_users backup_ops If i setup permissions using these groups, the SID's will persist across installations, however isn't there any way to create a new user account with a specific SID?

I reinstall my copy of windows xp every 2 months using an unattended installation cd. I only reformat my system partition and leave all my data on a different hard drive. What i've noticed is that user permissions get lost between installations. More specifically I've noticed that GUID's are used for storing user permissions by NTFS leaving a long list of {###'s} entries that don't resolve to a user name in the fresh installation. The user names themselves don't change. Is there any way i can keep my permissions between installations?

Well i got it working. As it turns out. The only real restriction with the dhcp clients is you can't use two adapters for the same subnet. So I have my two internal adapaters setup as 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.2.1 - Each of these automatically distribute dhcp scopes within their given subnets and nothing else. This was the part that was unclear to me at first. Apparently the binding is for some case where two adapters both have statically configured ip's in the same subnet. With binding you can manually resolve potential conflicts. All adapters dynamically configured never even show up in the dhcp management console. The second part involved placing a filter in routing and remote access. Using an input filter i drop all packets being sent from any ip in the 192.168.2 subnet which are directed to the 192.168.1 subnet. This way i can setup public servers on the 192.168.2 subnet which anyone in the world can access and anything on the 192.168.1 subnet is my personal intranet stuff.

I am connected to a cable modem with a router which serves ip addresses to the rest of the computers in my home. My router is running windows 2000 and uses the windows 2000 dhcp server to assign addresses. I have 3 network adapters in total on my router and would like to use this third adapter in conjunction with a wireless AP to provide 'insecure public access' to the internet. I want to do this while keeping my home network invisible to the wireless users. I'd like to use the ip addresses 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24 for the home and wireless networks. I have tried but been unable to define two scopes on my dhcp server which each bind to a single(different) network adapter. Once i have the two distinct subnets being served i'd like to ensure through the windows 2000 routing/remote access service that no packets can be transmitted to my home network from the wireless network. Is this at all possible and what must i do to set it up?