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Hey thanks a lot for all of your help guys! I think I understand this mess now, I just hate calling Microsoft everytime. I always have to end up talking to a live person no matter what I punch in during the automated portion!!! Sonic had mentioned drivers, and that's actually the next thing I'm looking to tackle. I know dell puts all theirs drivers right up on their FTP site, and of course you can go through and download them all from their website, the only thing is, they are all in self extracting EXE's, so there's no way Windows Setup will see them properly. Has someone already extracted these and made a disk of Dell drivers from which Windows Setup can reference?

If I backup WPA.DBL, will it still prompt me for a Product Key when I install? I've noticed a lot of Winnt.sif's simply have ProductKey=" " or ProductKey="XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX.....", does this tell Windows Setup just to ignore the product key and grab it from the WPA.DBL file or is this just so people don't steal their keys when they post their Winnt.sif?

Hey, I operate a computer repair shop.. The vast majority of repairs we get are simply PC's that have been really messed up from spyware/viruses. In really bad off cases we simply reformat the computer, reinstall windows, drivers, etc... and call it a day. I'm trying to streamline this process a little bit by making an unattended cd. I want to write a script which reads info from the registry, prior to reformatting the drive, and builds a Winnt.sif file to be used during the fresh installation. This would save me the hassle of having to enter in ProductKey, Computer Name, Workgroup Name, Time Zone.. things like that. I've been doing a bunch of reading on how to read from the registry and I found a couple of good scripts in these forums. Specifically: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...533;entry442597 My question is with the ProductKey though. When I read the product key from a run of the mill Dell Dimension, the product key derived from the registry isn't what's on the side of the case... I've tested this on multiple machines and it seems like this applies to all Dell's. My best geuss is that dell uses a different product key than what is on the side of the case for one reason or another (maybe to avoid activation??). Either way, would it be okay to use this ProductKey in the fresh install? I'm going to be using my own OEM cd, not the ones from Dell since each PC we get in is different and most of the time the customer lost the cd a long time ago. I'm thinking this would give me trouble when I go to activate, but I may be able to back up the WPA.DBL file? I'm just trying to figure out the best way of going about this. Thanks for any help you can give -Dan