Since they're is a lot of new hotfixes every month, I want to make an unattended installation partition in order to modify my files when it'll be necessary.

But I don't know how to make the pc booting from this partition and can find the solution nowhere. Can anybody help me?

Thank you!

you'd have to use a boot disk, and then call winnt.exe to start the installation.

Thanks Alanoll! A response in 2 minutes! I can't hope better!!!

Nice day!

more info please -

what kind of boot disk? Just a basic old fashion one? or the XP boot disks? I assume that a normal bootdisk just to get to a DOS prompt is all that is needed. Making sure to load the SMARTDRV driver too?!

Calling Winnt.exe - at the CMD prompt - just type WINNT?

what about the apps and drive letters - I suppose the %CDROM% variables I use would work the same as it would look for the drive with the CD.

IF EXIST D:\CD.id set CDROM=D:

IF EXIST E:\CD.id set CDROM=E:

......

What I do is have my files on a share on one of my servers. Anything that gets installed at the RunOnce part installs from the network share. That way I just update the files at the server. I originally did this because not every thing I wanted loaded would fit on a CD and none of my workstations have a DVD.

I tried to call winnt.exe with a bootdisk but i can't. No drive was found without A:

If your XP source files are on an NTFS partiton, then a DOS boot disk will not work. You can't access NTFS partitions from DOS

You can reformat the partition as FAT16. A normal Dos Boot Disk will be able to read that.

Or make yourself a bartpe CD:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Use WinPE or BartPE to call Win32.exe

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/

The bottom link at the above page is the Unvervsal Boot Disk. I was able to boot with the floppy it created and launch I386\winnt.exe from an NTFS partition.

Download the zipfile, extract the contents to a folder, put a blank floppy in the drive and run MAKEUBD.BAT.

My system froze up during the loading of the CD-ROM driver. If you have the same problem, delete this from the autoexec.bat:

IF NOT EXIST %RAMD%:\CDROM.BAT GOTO IOMEGA
ECHO.
CHOICE Load CD-ROM driver (2 Ä with custom drivers) /C:012 /T:1,3
IF ERRORLEVEL 3 SET CDROMCMD=/C
IF ERRORLEVEL 2 CALL %RAMD%:\CDROM.BAT %CDROMCMD%
SET CDROMCMD=

It's a pretty slick setup as far as floppy boot disks go. It's probably overkill for the simple task of launching winnt.exe but there are quite of few useful utilities. For myself, I'm going to slim it down somewhat to get rid of the things I won't use.