I am trying to perform an unattended installation of Windows Server 2003 with SP2 on a bare metal HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server, using WinPE 2.0 and customised scripts from the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit 1.9 win32

Text-mode setup completes successfully, but when the server restarts to enter the GUI stage of Setup, an error message of "A disk read error occurred" is displayed.

A have located the problem to the format section, a can run the installation by format to fat32 first and then convert to ntfs in unattend.txt but a realy want to format using ntfs first.

(Diskpart entrys)

rescan

select disk=0

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

assign letter=c

format fs=NTFS quick

or i can format using script later during the installation

@%MsTools%\format c: /FS:NTFS /Q /y

copying a lot of files then..

c:\i386\winnt32 /s:c:\i386 /unattend:c:\unattend.txt /syspart:c

create a file called fixboot.reg

paste the following text into it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vds\Alignment]

@="Alignment Settings in Bytes"

"Between4_8GB"=dword:00000000

"Between8_32GB"=dword:00000000

"GreaterThan32GB"=dword:00000000

"LessThan4GB"=dword:00000000

now run this command before doing any diskpart steps:

reg import fixboot.reg

this resolves disk alignment issue with winpe 2.x etc

After you format the drive and before you run winnt32.exe run this command: bootsect /nt52 c: /force

After you format the drive and before you run winnt32.exe run this command: bootsect /nt52 c: /force

This is what I use and it works perfectly.

On another not regarding the SSSTK. Does anyone use the Statemgr utility from the tool kit? Does it work for you in PE 2.0 and up? I cant get it to work properly. It throws an error and fails to properly register the state in the nvram. Anone have any insights?