Unattended XP setup & activation hell, please help!

[Teh_Tech]

Hi all, this is the situation I am in at the moment:

I recently got given a laptop for christmas that has XP Pro installed, I also have the system restore CD's as well as the hidden recovery partition on the hard drive, I was really determined to finally see through to the very end an unattended XP setup DVD with all my programs & apps ASAP.

I have now completed this, I have nLit'ed it and got windows updates & my apps to work perfectly, it is all good apart from 1 thing, activation!

I have tested the DVD in a virtual PC and on my laptop on the original HDD that came with the laptop (I upgraded the HDD as it was only an 80GB) anyways, I have tried every single way described on this site to preserve the activation (saved the wpl.db & registry snippets) and set it to restore this when windows installs, BUT, after WinXP is installed, I get WGAtray come up telling me this version of WindowsXP is not activated, I thinks no worries, I will just make sure all my apps & settings work first to avoid too many activations, but after WPI reboots the PC, I am told I HAVE to activate windows to continue to use it, if I click on OK, it tries to activate, but to no avail as I have currently disabled the network adaptor (I dont like being connected to the net without AV software installed first) and if I click the other button, it just logs me off again, so is there ANY way that works so I dont have to activate Windows everytime I install XP??

Please help as it has taken me a good few weeks of me forcing myself to stick with this project and not just give up, I just need this last piece completed before I can burn the DVD and start using it.

Thank you very much in advance for your solutions

[Kiki Burgh]

hi Teh_Tech! which laptop brand? have you tried autoactivate=yes via .sif file? if you nLited, did you remove OOBE?

i'm not sure if you've you come across the listed topics below, but could be worth your time:

OEMScan - Automated Multi Manufacture Pre-Activation Utility

Multi Manufacturer Pre-Activation

The OEM A.C.T.

RogueSpear's OEM Preactivation ScriptPack Addons*

a few more posts:

Dell OEM XP Slipstream, Avoiding Activation Annoyances

Auto-Activate XP on Install, ...how?

Unattended activation of retail XP(inc SP2)

Trouble with slipstream Dell OEM Win XP* (though not for IBM, it discussed about pre-activation on Dell)

please share with us your findings ... cheers!

edit: added 2 more topics above marked with *

btw, i think this topic is more appropriate in the Unattended Windows 2000/XP/2003 section

Edited January 22, 2010 by Kiki Burgh

[Teh_Tech]

Thanks for your reply Kiki and sorry for the wrong section, I was pretty much out of it last night, not much sleep recently, but anyways lol!

My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T42, I had a quick look at the OEMScan thing last night, but Im not sure I could figure it out as everytime I tried to do the scan, it would tell me there were missing files in the Lenovo folder, so I did a search and found all the files it said couldnt be found in the system32 folder along with another 1 from CatRoot, but once the files were copied into the Lenovo folder of OEMScan nothing happened!

I am currently looking through the other links you kindly provided and will return my findings in due course (new house, no broadband so using my mobile as a modem and painfully slow lol)

EDIT:

Actually, I think now I understand a bit about the OEMscan utility, I have manually copied the oembios files into the proper folder, now for the important question, how do I call the oemscan program, ie, can I call it from the RunOnceEx.cmd file, would it be possible to call it from within WPI either before or after apps have finished installing or can it just be run from within windows when everything has loaded (ie, double click on it whenever) ?

Thanks

Edited January 21, 2010 by Teh_Tech

[Kiki Burgh]

you're welcome & no need to apologize

my previous experience was using the addon packaged by siginet on a dell motherboard so i included the addon (you could do so via rvmi or hfslip or nLite) to my unattended cd ... from what i understand too, this must be run during setup, ideally before wfp kicks in ... other users in the aforementioned threads have more & better experience

cheers & good luck!

edit: please see added topics above

Edited January 22, 2010 by Kiki Burgh