Functionality of HFEXPERT\WIN

[Tomalak]

Hello all,

A short question on the HFEXPERT feature in hfslip: do I understand correctly that using the WIN subdirectory I'm only able to add new files to existing folders, but not to completely add new folders there? I wanted to add drivers to my installation directly this time (not using nLite, and HFEXPERT\DRIVERCAB always showed its own difficulties for me). Therefore I added a "Drivers" folder and subfolders "01", "02", ... to HFEXPERT\WIN, containing all the drivers my PC requires. "OemPnPDriversPath" in WINNT.SIF was set appropriately.

The installation failed horribly: directly after the textmode part, booting into the first GUI, I got the error "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000142)" and the setup was terminated. After playing around the full day and doing several trial & error test installations in a VM I finally discovered that indeed this new folder in HFEXPERT\WIN was causing the error. Moving it to $OEM$\$ solved my problem.

So HFEXPERT\WIN is not a full $OEM$\$ replacement? I'm just asking as this is (IMHO) not clearly stated on http://hfslip.org/advanced.html, and e.g. HFEXPERT\PROGRAMFILES was explicitly designed as $OEM$\$Progs alternative. Or did I possibly do something else wrong? I don't have logfiles at hand right now, if really required I can of provide them for the working and the non-working version - but the only difference is the placement of the "Drivers" directory.

If this is in fact a more or less known limitation: it possible to add the "add folders in HFEXPERT\WIN also" feature to hfslip? How does nLite do that? I don't like it because it does too much magic and fiddles around with too many files in my installation source, but as far as I've seen it does not use $OEM$ and is able to integrate drivers directly to something like "Windows\NLDRV\<ThreeDigits>". I'm just curious...

Kind regards,

Tomalak