turning off disk indexing during setup ...

[Molecule]

When I build XP (sp3, OnePiece AIO + POSReady, x86 + .Net hassles), XP starts up with indexing service turned on, and during setup or prehaps first logon, XP builds an index for every hard disk it can find (or it sets an index=on tag for all files it can find, according to some set of rules somewhere, ...)

 

When I turn indexing off for a hdd (Explorer > "drive" Properties > General tab > Indexing), it has to scroll through ?hundreds? of files, to reset some indexing attribute. Some files won't allow the "please index me" attribute to be removed.

 

Is there a way to use WINNT.SIF to turn off indexing service before or during setup? I obviously don't need the Windows Desktop Search in my taskbar, but I think that can be turned off by adding a line in [Components] section.-- WDSearch = "off" perhaps?

 

My preference is to use WINNT.SIF or other text file I can edit. nLite is too complex for me. There are several places to deal with indexing service and my machines don't have power to play virtual machines, to hack around with nLite to verify how it works. nLite is a great program, and I'm not insulting it, or anyone who has years of familiarity with it. I don't want to start a nLite discussion -- I just want to find another way to turn off indexing service during setup.

 

== edit ==

 

An article suggests the following REG add command might turn indexing service off

 

net stop cisvc
REG add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CiSvc" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f
 

(from http://www.computerstepbystep.com/windows-xp-indexing-service.html)

 

maybe there's a way to add that to WINNT.SIF?

 

== end edit ==

 

thanks ...

Edited August 14, 2015 by Molecule

[w2k4eva]

An article suggests the following REG add command might turn indexing service off

 

net stop cisvc

REG add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CiSvc" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /d 4 /f

 

(from http://www.computerstepbystep.com/windows-xp-indexing-service.html)

 

maybe there's a way to add that to WINNT.SIF?

 

Actually it is the "net stop cisvc" that turns it off - the regkey sets the service startup type to "disabled" so it will not restart at next boot.

 

Not sure about adding it to winnt.sif but a simpler way might be to add the key at T-12 via cmdlines.txt as described at http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/14/ - they even show an example of using a *.reg file there (which is a handy thing to have - you can just add more keys/tweaks all in one convenient place without mucking around in winnt.sif at all).

 

Oh, almost forgot - are you using HFSLIP? If so you can toss that same *.reg file into the HFSVCPACK folder, where it will be run at T-13 and not bother with $OEM$ or cmdlines.txt either.

 

Edited August 15, 2015 by w2k4eva