Customise winnt.sif before the Setup starts !

[kenedy]

If setup is launched from DOS it needs formated, nonNTFS partition. So first you must create a FAT16/32 partition and (optionally) later convert it to NTFS.

Option to convert to NTFS can be added to your .bat file.

NTFSDOS PRO probably would allow to use NTFS partitions.

It is possible to create nice user interface (checboxes, listboxes, input fields etc) with WBAT and write values to answer file using INIFILE 1.2 Looks nice and doesnt ask million of questions if, for example, the only thing I want to change is ProductID.

I read somewhere on this forum that setup from DOS is slower even with smartdrive. Can someone confirm it?

WBAT, INIFILE: http://home.mnet-online.de/horst.muc/

For easy to use RAMDrive look here: http://www.geocities.com/politalk/rmdrv/dos.htm

then i'll run some batch file to detect the drive letter for my cd

Edit AUTOEXEC.BAT, and assign letter X: to CD

MSCDEX /?

[Jazz]

If setup is launched from DOS it needs formated, nonNTFS partition. So first you must create a FAT16/32 partition and (optionally) later convert it to NTFS.

Doh i dint know that one, so what should be done about this ?, i'm gonna assume that one partition has to be formatted to be used for XP, so maybe we can ask the user to enter the Partition to be formatted... or used for install..

NOTE :- i wanna ask the user to enter the partition and not the Drive letter, that means that for that first i'll have to to display the partition info via some program, maybe a paramater of fdisk, (that can show ntfs as well), or aefdisk or something like that... then we can format that using Oformat, so that it'll be optimised to be converted to NTFS later on..

But for this i'll have to assume that the user has already created the partitions... Is there any app that'll allow to create the partitions without actually rebooting ?

Or maybe i ask too much !

I'm sure there will be some practical method to deal with this problem...

Hey and what regarding the slow setup thingy ! is it true ? i think the only thing that should be affected is the first copy process, cuz after that XP will install its own kernel or something....

BYe,

Jazz

[Jazz]

a very small bump !