Unattended Install of Win2k from WinPE1.5

[pauledavey]

**Not sure if this should have gone in the WInpe forum, so apologies if this needs to be moved**

So far I have:

created a winpe 1.5 cd with HTA, WMI and WSH support. I have mapped a drive to a win2k distribution share.

the problems i have are the following:

(A) When I use diskpart to create two partitions on the disk, I still need to restart the machine before I can use them. I thought winpe gets rid of this limitation?

(B) When I run winnt32.exe /unattend:filename.txt /s:z:\i386 /copyfile:LANG setup starts. However, it complains that it cannot reboot the machine and I have to do this manually.

I want a win2k unattended installation launched from Winpe1.5

Dont know if it matters, but the PC is an HP DC7100 with 80GB SATA Drive.

Any help or thoughts on why I have these problems?

Thanks

Paul

[mbouchard]

(A) When I use diskpart to create two partitions on the disk, I still need to restart the machine before I can use them. I thought winpe gets rid of this limitation?

This is the command line that I use with my 2K install via PE. Note the bolded text, this is what you need to continue without a reboot after diskpart.

winnt32.exe /Noreboot [B]/Syspart:C /TempDrive:C[/B] /unattend:c:\nt\custom\unattend.txt

( When I run winnt32.exe /unattend:filename.txt /s:z:\i386 /copyfile:LANG setup starts. However, it complains that it cannot reboot the machine and I have to do this manually.

When you call the setup (Winnt32.exe) make sure that you use wait on return

WshShell.Run "winnt32.exe unattend:filename.txt /s:z:\i386 /copyfile:LANG",1,TRUE

and the use sendkeys to send exit to the cmd window. I have been using this code since verion 1.0 and have never had a failure.

Do'Reboot PC.  Close Up to 5 open CMD windows
  Do While Counter < 5
 Counter = Counter + 1
 If Counter = 6 Then
   Check = False
 Exit Do
 End If
 WshShell.AppActivate "cmd"
 WshShell.sendkeys "exit"
 WshShell.sendkeys "~"
   Loop
Loop Until Check = False

[pauledavey]

thanks for the advice. I basically figured it out and then saw your post. Thanks for the hints :-)