prathapml

Activate your current install, in the normal manner, then copy "C:\Windows\System32\wpa.dbl" to your uA CD at this folder location: "$OEM$\$$\System32\" That's all, it will be activated when you are finished with install.

I think its also pertinent to include in the guide, a page about activation - about how to copy away and restore wpa.dbl

If you're doing an unattended install of XP, then its new-style by default (you don't need to do anything to enable it). If you're referring to win2k though, its not possible to have the new-style.

What does it do? It just creates appropriate entries in the registry according to the settings you chose in Batch98. You can make your own, if you so desire. The above code is some stuff, posted to get one started. Using it, one can be able to automate the entire process for win98/ME to be as good as unattended win2k/XP. It is made for the purpose of: 1. Enabling you to just boot from the CD and start setup and walk away. 2. It will run through the entire setup silently 3. Then apply the .REG silently 4. Install specified programs silently. 5. reboot and stop at the logon screen.

Yes, it will give you access to your hard-drive. But only for DOS-readable FAT32 partitions. I mean, NTFS partitions created for XP won't be usable in DOS. And its recommended to not use Hard-drive emulation (what you called as hard-drive mode) for the floppy-disk's boot-sector. You can fill-up the rest of the space on the CD (whatever remains after the boot-sector was loaded) anyway - that will be close to 700 MB.

Okay, you asked for it. Truckload of text, and is available at the link below. Just extract and open in notepad, and do a Ctrl-F (find) for the port number you want. download ZIP (24 KB)

@mbartosh Welcome to MSFN. About the directory structure: No, you're not doing anything wrong. Except, the unattended guide there is mainly oriented towards WinXP. And XP has a lot of deployment features enhanced, compared to win2k. On Win2k, only these folders are confirmed to work- $1 (for %systemdrive%), $$ (for %systemroot%) and $Docs (for "Documents and Settings"). The $Progs folder seems to be an addition, with XP.

I guess all that will come some time later - with the board upgrade. Then we can have color themes, which each individual can choose between. As of now, with this version (which will soon be replaced), I don't think any additions are feasible (because it will be only for a short time - soon we'll be moving to IPB2).

If you have a CD-writer and Nero (as CD-burning software), you can make a bootable DOS CD instead of floppy: 1. Start nero burning ROM. Don't use the wizard, and don't use "Nero Express". 2. File >> New 3. In the dialog-box that comes up, scroll down the left-pane, choose CD-ROM (Boot) 4. Now, on the right side's "Boot" tab, choose the "Image File" option. 5. So now your boot-sector is enabled, click "New" button on the top-right. 6. Add whatever files you want to the CD. (your new BIOS, or whatever) 7. Burn CD, that's all. If you have problems: You can download latest nero from here. You might need a different Image file if your CD-drive is not supported - if so, download the boot-sector from bootdisk.com as SC00BS said. While writing the CD, for best compatibility with older CD-ROMs, close any multi-sessions on disk, and write at 24x or lower speed. Hoping this helps...

Well, with RunOnceEX method you have a vertical list on-screen, showing the total and how many is finished - so you don't really need a percentage display. But if you do want it, check out the XPlode tool.

The first one is the new-style shutdown prompt in XP. The second one is the default one found in win2k/ME (and in XP too). Go into ControlPanel>>UserAccounts and click "Change the way users log on or off". Now you see a check-box named "Use the Welcome screen". If you have that option checked, you get the new-style. If unchecked, you will have the old-style. In your case, you'd want to enable the check-mark.

Finally, a conclusion of the guide, with screenshots of how the final result looks. Yes, its meant for "intermediate home users" but still, if one knows what to expect, its easier than pursuing an abstract dream. A few shots - like one at CD-boot, one at text-mode, one at device detection, one at T-12, and the final desktop look (with all installed) and more would be good too. Fact is, many of those who come to the site haven't done a windows install before, in their life (or they are familiar with older versions). This will put in yet another angle to the guide - of a visual walk-through of the uA install process. As an aside, the multi-boot guide could do with some screenshots too (initially it did have scrshots, I can send it if you want). The aim here basically, is a comprehensive guide... A to Z! Ever taken a look at this site? http://unattended.sourceforge.net (don't let the simple layout of the home-page fool you, its a wonderful resource - and the site's mailing-lists has excellent discussion of relevant things) Well, we wanna beat it.

No, it must be possible to call the DLL to do it. I think your command would look something like: rundll32 zipfldr.dll,section 2I don't use XP's zipping facility though, so maybe someone else who comes along can give a clearer idea.

Its meant for use only on Tablet PC, so you have already seen that it doesn't install on XP home/pro. But if you want to use it, don't bother about "allowed". It would just come in the same category as people hacking the uxtheme.dll and using 3rd party VisualStyles. MS won't really bother to come and get you just for the Royale theme. On the contrary, the longer you are fascinated with their products, the better for them since you get locked-in to them.

If you need to change your password for your business account, you can do this: 1. Login to your main account. 2. From "Start", go to "Accessories" menu and start the "Command Prompt". 3. Now at the command prompt, type the following command: net user USERNAME passwordUse your actual username and password that you wish to set.

That's really strange.... Its supposed to be fine, the way you did it. Is the CD you copied from, damaged in any way? Tried installing from the source disk on any other machine?

With win98, check if the registering command is "regsvr.exe" instead.

rofl

I'm not having time currently, for looking in more detail... But on the surface I can tell this: Why didn't you customise and use the included sample XML! Much of longhorn is still un-crusted - it has newly introduced items as well as has compatibility (to an extent) with XP and its tools. Which explains why you got disappointed with the old-style answer-file the tool gave.

I really don't know what language of XP you have. But whatever variable is referring to your ProgramFiles path (from the command SET in a command prompt) will be the one you have to use.

I'm using color below to differentiate between the sections/pages. One good thing to do, would be get 'em familiar with the term "uA". Refer to the word by its full-form once, and then in the rest of the guide call "unattended" as "uA". Otherwise they just don't understand the short-form. And its a waste of time on the forum to be typing and explaining to each new person. Other than that, apps silent install pages need a major update (i.e., old switches still works. Just update the version numbers ). And then, these apps switches can be added: latest flash player v7 (/s) Opera (/s) (and copy OUsr600.dat as license file) CPU-Idle Extreme 7 (/S) TweakNow PowerPack 2005 (/VERYSILENT /SP-) UltraISO 7.25 MediaEdition (/VERYSILENT /SP-) K-Lite revolution 2.6 (/VERYSILENT /SP-) shareaza 2.1 (/silent) MSN Messenger Plus! 3.40 (/SilentInstallNoSponsor) winamp - link to alanoll's own MSI For the Sun JRE, dotNET fw and AcroRead6 - link to ryanvm's repacked installers moz, ff, tb, maxthon - link to re-packed MSI (or link to my forum post for this, prolly - since anyway lot of changes to installer is needed, for it to work). All these are a pretty small number of apps (the more important of the lot). Having the new apps included in switches is obviously not out of stake for *ME* as I already have all of it done, and so do you - the recommendation is for the sake of others' benefit. Whatever more you add to the SQL (db of switches) you're thinking of, please get it off the ground with the above apps atleast, in the guide itself. (after that, take all the time you want for the SQL) And then some additions to the Installer-types pages (where it talks of WISE/inno/MSI/InstallShield): 1. Many newer applications come packaged in MSI installers. When you install it, you'd like it to progress smoothly with no unexpected turns. That objective is now possible with MSIs - just use the "/QB-!" switch. That literally "id***-proof"s the install for that program atleast. What it does is to: a. install in quiet mode b. show a progress bar c. suppress any error-boxes (if it fails, it will fail silently) d. and the exclamation mark at the end will remove the "Cancel" button from the installation dialog so that no one can possibly meddle with your install. So that's actually perfectly what we've always wanted - all that anyone monitoring your install can do, is to watch as the progress-bar is displayed. give a link to MSI switches info 2. The same MSI installer also opens a whole new vista for those needing to deal with it. If you come across any major app, you've probably found yourself wanting the install to finish quicker and use less disk-space. In such cases you can use the Administrative Install-Point (AIP) method - also called as a server image or network-install. And then some app-installers are simply too fidgety with switches - even then AIP comes to the rescue. This is how to do it: a. First we need to make the AIP. b. So you can either run the original installer with a switch of "/A" to get it to walk you through the process of making an AIP. c. Or in some cases you can start the original installer in the normal way (double-click) and look in your %Temp% folders for the newly-extracted MSI (and associated folders/files too). d. So now you have an AIP which you can copy away to a folder anywhere (and then either put it on your uA CD or do what's described in "Space Starved tips"). 3. Then there are a whole lot of half-baked installers out there, that run through the installation and then startup the program that was just installed. What happens with these, is that the actual install-process itself can be made "silent" through switches, but they spoil our unattended endeavour of smoothly installing one program after another, by starting up the program they install. In such cases, the programs that open, can be "killed" so that the install will proceed without hindrance. You need - pskill. Put the EXE extracted from the download in "$OEM$\$$\System32" so that you can call it from commands. Now an example of how it works: start /wait %whateverpath%\alanollchooses\appinstallname.exe /S pskill appname.exeThat will install Appname, and when it attempts to start for its first-run to show itself to you, the next command is executed. That next command will kill the running program whose name you've specified (doing this is similar to "End Task"). ---- Now, here we have some tips of experience for you: Ensure that your installer and program's filenames is different from each other. That is, ensure that if your program's name (which is to be killed) is winamp.exe, then your installer for the same is named something else (like WA_install.exe or something). Otherwise unplanned-for events can happen. 4. Lastly there's some programs whose installer is just not suitable (for unattending). With such programs you can use the direct copy method. This method is suitable when the following conditions are satisfied: a. The programs themselves run fine with just the set of files that you find was installed in its folder (normally in ProgramFiles). b. The program does not need any registry keys to be modified to notify the system that it "exists". c. The installer does not put files in any folder other than its own installation folder. d. The main thumb-rule here probably is that if the application is small it can do with the "direct copy". Big apps like MS-Office, Photoshop, etc. are unsuited to this method. So once you have concluded that an app is good for the direct copy method, here's how to do it: a. Install the program in the normal way (and note where it installs its files). b. You can run it and configure it to how you want (since these settings will become the new defaults). c. Go into the installed folder (normally in %ProgramFiles%), and copy away the entire folder. d. Go to the start-menu and copy away the shortcuts for the program. e. You can now put the program folder (which you copied away in step C) in "$OEM$\$Progs\YourFolderName" - it will be there after your next install from your uA disk. f. Put the shortcuts here on the uA disk - "$OEM$\$Docs\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\AppName" (you should change the file-paths in the shortcuts/links to point to system variables - i.e., %ProgramFiles% instead of "C:\Program Files"). g. That's it - your app looks just like it was installed. Tips for Space-starved users: You'll find that your 700 MB CD is just not sufficient for holding all the programs you'd like to install unattendedly. If you find yourself in that position, it is the direct-copy method and AIP method that you should favour the most for cutting-down on the space used on CD. You can use WinRAR/7zip to create a compressed, silent, self-extracting archive for those 2 methods. In the case of AIPs, setup your silent archive to extract to "%SystemDrive%\install\Applications" path, and then from that point onwards, your batch files should go onwards to run the setup silently. In the case of "direct copy" method, you can compress the installed folder, and make it silently extract to "%ProgramFiles" (if you do this, no need to use the $Progs step mentioned in direct-copy). At this point have a short explanation of what SFX really is/means, with screenshots for winrar and 7zip (make it for TOTALLY silent) archives with parameters for extracting to defined paths. 5. If none of the methods suit your app, then you need to "rebuild" your app's installer. Download InstallRite and ask it to monitor your system when the program is installing. You will then have a new installer which installs totally silent. Grrr..... ended up spending too much time just on typing this (these posts better be worth the time!). Please don't skip over any of the multitude of suggestions here. My longest ever posts here (even got me hungry halfway through, lol). I don't know if you'd really feel it worth the time to add-in all these things to advanced. But my gut-feeling says that putting up all this in the baseline-reference guide (though in super-advanced section) will improve the general standard of uA setups, plus bring more people and ideas that take-off from there. I think implementing all of the above will take us to a new level altogether (that of a premium, all-in-one-place site) - orienting towards even professionals. Some of the above ideas might make you think that it involves too much tying-in with forum pages - but that's the idea (we want ppl to take a look inside forum as well, instead of just a shallow skimming of the guide. If any disputes, I'm on messenger. I don't need more post-count thru _disputing_ I'm not gonna let you off easily, lol - the above additions demand a lot of effort. I'm not a graphics whiz - but willing to help if you need me to write any pages.

After taking a look at it, the reason why your useraccounts.cmd did not work is because you have quotes around the name of the user you wanted to create. What you need to know about the command-line is that if your parameter (such as "USER NAME") has a space, only then you should add quote-characters around it. Otherwise, in your case where there was no spacing (you simply had it named User) the quotes is not needed.

ShareAza is just too prone to this sort of thing, probably. Take a look at my months-old post - link. There's still no response for it . ShAza is extremely good sometimes and altogether **** at other times. Finally, what someone said (with regard to solving my problem) was to forget using multi-P2P clients like ShAza, and use the native ones instead. Like if you are using eDonkey, stick with one of the ed2k clients that've got de-facto official recognition. Similarly with torrent...

13. Having the "SendTo>> Notepad" menu using $Docs. 14. Rename your network interface to have a more intuitive name: netsh interface set interface name="Local Area Connection" newname="Uplink to BigBro" 15. The cleanup section can include regsvr32 /u /s mydocs.dllTo remove the irritant MyPics/MyVids/My---- series of folders forcibly re-creating themselves even after you delete them. 16. And then, just after the unnecessary files/folders are deleted in cleanup (and before the final command to reboot), this command should be recommended as a tip: defrag c: -f -v Have you ever noticed that big chunks of files are created and deleted during a uA install? For a home user or 3D gamer, the final defrag before reboot is a boon to have everything in perfect order by the end of the uA. 17. Tell them how to pre-set a chosen user-icon: copy /Y %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\Default Pictures\astronaut.bmp %SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\MYNAME.bmpImportant here, is to remember that GIF/PNG/JPG images won't do - you have to have BMP of specified size (or suffer an auto-resize). 18. security stuff for cleanup.cmd: REM de-activating known hostile file types for security purposes assoc .eml=txtfile .iss .log .sif .diz .nfo .sfv .... and lots more extensions (I'll post 'em all if you find the idea good)I find it so **** idiotic, that people go searching for DIZ and NFO viewers, when they can just as well associate it to notepad (with above command) and be happy with no complication. 19. Include a section for IE pre-configuration tweaks. The average user knows nothing about what Registry Tweaks is - and that everything is possible from there. He just knows what something is when he sees it being described by what it does - and its upto the guide-maker to give grouped-by-task options (as indeed MS has done with XP). 20. Usage of HOSTS file to block out porn/scam/pop-ups. (just hope though, that your users won't go take a look at the hosts file and learn *PRECISELY* which are the juiciest sites to visit, lol) You can put the HOSTS somewhere on your CD and use batch-files to replace the original with your customized one. 21. More security stuff: How to pre-configure your windows firewall to the way you like it, using .REG - it won't bug you again once its configured! 21. Please have a suggestion in the modding (uxtheme, sfc_os) section of guide, saying that you should keep the changes you make to I386 as minimal as possible and always try to do things via $OEM$ where feasible. If you do make changes in that folder, list it down somewhere. Reasons are: 1. You have less work to do, when the next SP or hotfix comes round. 2. You can track things better - to trouble-shoot, or to ask for help on the forum. 22. Then, an idea in "graduate" level's regtweaks page - I say this bcos:1. You know some settings won't "stick" at that point, so keep your dealings at that point minimal. 2. Having it that way gives some nice possibilities (I can have one setting for all other users, and apply contradicting .REG for the main/admin account on the system). I use that for blocking access to control-panel and hidden/system files for all users except my primary account. 23. In some page for the drivers (for "graduate" users or whatever) - discuss the concept of compressing all drivers into 7zip archive then extracting it just before device detection DetachedProgram="%systemroot%\PnPdrvrs.exe" Arguments="-y /q /r:n" Remember since not too many switches are possible at that point, the "-o" switch for 7zip to specify location to extract to, is not specifiable. Therefore you should place PnPdrvrs.exe in "$OEM$\$$\" itself, and delete it from cleanup.cmd. 24. For ATi gfx and nvMixer, the usage of the below command (example) to selectively install the utility: if exist %systemroot%\system32\nvaudio.nvu start %systemroot%\PnPdrvrs\nF\AudioUtl\Setup.exe -sThis particular one is do-able not before first-logon - is only possible at GUIrunOnce or later. more coming

The card (by itself) is not very good while comparing to others. But if it has Video-in slots and costs less, then its a pretty okay choice. Unless you have any intentions of playing the latest 3D-games, you won't have any problems with the MX4000.