How to passwor protect the unattended windows installation?

[alchr]

Hi all!

I work in a business with more than 2000 employees. I have made myself an unattended winxp install cd with office 2003 and other software. One day i got a question of my boss, what if anyone loose this cd, and someone else finds it? This is a problem since this is a bought and paid for lisence wich is bad if it gets stolen.

So here is my question: Is there any way to passwordprotect the installation with automated input of the licence key in the winnt.sif?

I would like to add my own password to the installation wich is much shorter than the licence key.

You have any tips & tricks anyone?

[Arie]

Simply store the disc in a safe place, that's all you can do really.

[IcemanND]

There has been no totally secure solution provided yet that anyone has proposed that still allows for the functionality required for an UA CD. There is the option to encrypt the license key in the answer file but it limits the use of the UA CD to 60 days before you have to do it again. And I'm not sure how well encrypted it is, hopefully better than how it is stored in the registry.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328356

[Mulgie]

Hi people,

I am also very worried about my unattended disc getting into the wrong hands. I work at a big university here in Manchester, England and so besides XP itself my DVD also has tons of extra software packages that install from RunOnceEX like Office 2k3, Project 2k3, Mathtype 5.2c, MATLAB 2k7 etc. All of these packages also have their respective license keys kicking around the DVD too and so although VERY useful it's quite a liablilty if I lost it!

I've been hunting about for months now to try and find a way to protect my disc but as is said above there doesn't seem to be an easy way that has surfaced yet.

I did find details of password protected Linux disks that can multi-boot to different ISOs files but as I have zero knowledge of Linux and was baffled by the terminology I had to give that a miss plus, that still wouldn't prevent people from extracting the files from the ISOs on the Linux disk either would it?

What I was hoping is that there is some way of command-line mounting and booting an encrypted image file like Magic ISO's UIF format, anyone out there know if this would be even possible?

Cheers.