I've been setting up a network-based unattended XP installation and thanks to this forum I have found the answers to most of the problems I encountered.

At this point I'm left with 1 open point.

How to organise the partitions on the target PC automatically ?

In short what happens:

- I create a FAT32 16Gb partition on an empty hard disk

- I start the unattended installation to that partition

- at the end the installation has created 1 NTFS partition taking all disk space on the hard disk

Is this due to the FileSystem=ConvertNTFS I have in the unattended.txt file ?

If I want a C-partition of maximum 16Gb and all the other free disk space in the D-partition, do I have to create the partitions before I start the unattended setup ?

Can I use diskpart for that ? My network boot runs a Windows 98 DOS environment.

Thanks for any feedback,

Luc.

Yes you would need to partition seperatly. Diskpart is for 32 bit mode, but you can download delpart.exe from the win2k resource kit which is like diskpart but runs in dos mode. Or you could use winpe to script disk part

-gosh

Thanks for the info Gosh.

Since I don't have access to WinPE I'm afraid I will have to find a method in DOS to:

- get the size of the hard disk

- based on that size determine what needs to be allocated to partition 1 and partition 2.

For example partition 1 can be max 8Gb but shouldn't take more then 50% of the entire hard disk.

I looked at several possibilities. But all of them (fdisk, gdisk, delpart, ...) didn't give me an easy way of doing that.

Does anyone know about a Dos-based scriptable tool or method that would allow that ?

lo

i am also playing around with network install and have some problems to automatically create partitions. i dont check if its more than 50% of the hdd, i am just using gdisk to create a 4gb fat32 partition which is big enough to install XP (gdisk 1 /del /all and gdisk 1 /cre /sz:4000 /for) - tbh: a 2gb fat16 would do the trick as well (gdisk 1 /cre /sz:2000 /for /-32)

in the unattend-file u can convert it to ntfs (filesystem=convertNTFS) and resize it to the full capacity (ExtendPartition=1 i think) or the size you want it (ExtendPartition=16000).