bobpaul

I've been setting up Unattended to streamline our machine deployment, but unfortunately we don't have good records of what's deployed where. DriverPacks.net looked like a godsend that could get things going at least until we could finish a decent inventory and build our own driver packs of what we actually need. I'm posting here to see if anyone else has done this before and if they have any tips on what needs to be done. So far I've tried simply extracting all of the packs into i386\$oem$\$1\ like I would normally and let Unattended take care of the oemdriverpath and other goodies, but I've encountered blue screens on the first 2 machines I tested it on. Unattended does launch the WinXP install using winnt.exe (in dosemu) and I something about the oemdriverpath length limit corrupting installs. Could this be part of the issue? Or has anyone else tried Unattended.sf.net with DriverPack.net's driverpacks have any tips on how to deploy? I didn't see much mention of it on the forums yet, but it's hard to search for Unattended (the project) without bringing up results for the general process/unattended.txt file.

I don't understand why you just didn't put the NIC drivers in the $OEM$ folder so that the machines had access to the network as soon as the textmode installer was done.. I mean, what you did is really neat, but it really seems like it'll be harder for the next guy to maintain because he'll have to rely entirely on whatever documentation you leave behind, rather than the unattended.sf.net mailing lists/wiki/this forum, etc. If you're worried about maintaining the NIC driver folder manually, you could try this: http://driverpacks.net/Projects/DriverPacks/ You should really have all the drivers in your unattended installation anyway so you have less cleanup to do at the end.