Hmm. I think I am going crazy now. I followed the Basic guide for an unattended install, and when I made the ISO, mounted and tried it, not only did the boot screen ask me how to partition and format, but windows asked me questions and prompted me to add users and everything!

And yes, I did create my WINNT.SIF and place it in the I386 directory. It does not end in .txt.

Has this happened to anyone else, and if so, where did you go wrong?

It may help us if you post your winnt.sif somewhere for us to troubleshoot.

eg: my basic winnt.sif file (I like to partition manually)

Edited August 21, 200719 yr by Tasslehoff

Hmm. I think I am going crazy now. I followed the Basic guide for an unattended install, and when I made the ISO, mounted and tried it, not only did the boot screen ask me how to partition and format, but windows asked me questions and prompted me to add users and everything!

And yes, I did create my WINNT.SIF and place it in the I386 directory. It does not end in .txt.

Has this happened to anyone else, and if so, where did you go wrong?

You DON'T want to automatically partition a hard drive do you? NO unattended CDs or DVDs i've seen or downloaded have this feature. Your other concerns are valid IMHO.

Yes, post your WinNT.sif file.

Another thing to do is just use nLite !!!! It will do everything for you !!!

EDIT: it seems you can auto partition, just add this line to the DATA section:

AutoPartition = 1

For more info on all the settings, look inside ref.chm which is inside DEPLOY.CAB which should be on your XP CD.

Edited August 21, 200719 yr by soporific

I'm sorry! I thought I did post my Winnt.sif (I meant to anyway)

I would post it now, but I deleted everything and started over. When following the basic guide, it said to use the deployment tools to customize all those questions and create the unattended install. When I tried with nLite, it worked!

Now I need to learn how to do this RunOnceEX stuff. Should I manually enter the commands into nLite?

Well, anyway - the WinNT.sif file is the file to use to auto answer questions asked during the actual OS install. To automate the answers on the first boot (Like User names, Register with Microsoft, exc.) use the file oobeinfo.ini (Should be copied to %SystemRoot%\System32\oobe\)