windows 2000 pro no F6 key

[win2k]

Today I found myself tasked with installing Windows 2000 pro on a shiny new piece of hardware: A new computer with an MSI KT4 with Onboard SATA Promise PDC 20376. The only problem is that onboard raid is new, so win2k lacks built-in support for it. And Windows has trouble installing itself on a hard drive which it cannot see. Microsoft has a mechanism for dealing with this, of course. It is called the "TXTSETUP.OEM".

Windows Setup says "Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver". Then you press F6, insert your driver disk, and everything works fine. ...If you are installing from CD-ROM, that is. If instead you are Installing from CD unattended with sp3 or sp4 slipstreamed and hotfix files and massstorage, things are a tad trickier.

Installing Windows from CD-ROM goes roughly as follows. You boot from CD-ROM and with WINNT.SIF. It creates something on your C: drive and then reboots. As a quick and dirty hack, I waited for winnt.exe to populate the C: drive, waited for the "Press F6..." prompt after the reboot, pressed F6, and fed in the fasttx2k driver disk. Oops, no good. Setup complained about being unable to find various .sys, .inf and .cat files. Well, no matter. Who wants to sit around every time you install Windows, anyway? And "Unattended" is practically my middle name. Surely I can automate it. Heck, Microsoft makes it plain as day in a KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;288344

Note step 5 in particular, which suggests that different installation methods require slightly different TXTSETUP.OEM files. Let me share with you the relevant lines from the original TXTSETUP.OEM on the driver disk. (For clarity, I am omitting the

Non-relevant lines of the file which is to say most of them.)

[Disks]
d3 = "Promise FastTrak 376 Driver Diskette", \fasttx2k, \Win2000

[Defaults]
scsi = FastTrak_TX2K_nt5

[scsi]
FastTrak_TX2K_nt5 = "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 (tm) Controller", fasttx2k

[Files.scsi.FastTrak_TX2K_nt5]
driver = d3, fasttx2k.sys, fasttx2k
inf    = d3, fasttx2k.inf
catalog= d3, fasttx2k.cat

[HardwareIds.scsi.FastTrak_TX2K_nt5]
id="PCI\VEN_105A&DEV_3376", "fasttx2k"


[Config.fasttx2k]
value = "", Tag, REG_DWORD, 1

Here is what this means.

First, the [Disks] section declares a disk named "d3", with a

Human-readable description of "Promise FastTrak 376 Driver", and a directory of "\Win2000". That is, this and the driver files it includes all reside within the \Win2000 directory. Second, the [sCSI] section declares a driver ID of

FastTrak_TX2K_nt5 which is the identifier the rest of the file uses to name the driver. It has a description of "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 ™ Controller", fasttx2k; Relevant here. Finally, the [FILES.SCSI] section defines the files which comprise the FastTrak_TX2K_nt5 driver. This section says that the proper driver is on disk d3 in the file fasttx2k.sys, the INF file is on d3 in fasttx2k.inf, and the catalog file is on d3 in fasttx2k.cat. Right; so, following the KB article’s instructions, I edited the d3 Line of TXTSETUP.OEM like so: d3 = "Promise FastTrak 376 Driver Diskette", \Win2000. That is, I replaced \Win2000 with a dot. Then I copied all of the driver files, plus txtsetup.oem itself, to Z:\win2koem\$oem$\I386\TEXTMODE. I edited z:\site\winnt.sif to add these lines:

[MassStorageDrivers]
"Promise FastTrak 376 Driver" = "OEM"
"IDE CD-ROM (ATAPI 1.2)/PCI IDE Controller" = "RETAIL"

[OEMBootFiles]
TXTSETUP.OEM
FASTTX2K.CAT
FASTTX2K.INF
FASTTX2K.SYS

The [MassStorageDrivers] section says that I want to add a mass Storage driver during text mode setup. It says to look for the key "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 ™ Controller" in the [sCSI] Section of txtsetup.oem and to load that driver.

The [OEMBootFiles] section tells winnt.exe to copy TXTSETUP.OEM, FASTTX2K.CAT, FASTTX2K.INF, and FASTTX2K.SYS from $OEM$\TEXTMODE to the C: drive before rebooting. This is what the KB article said to do, so I did it. And it worked great. Just kidding! Actually, it failed miserably. Well, winnt.exe ran OK. But shortly after rebooting, Setup bombed like, so:File

\$WIN_NT$.~BT\$OEM$\.\FASTTX2K.SYS could not be loaded. The error code is 18, Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

To make more simple than writing 4 colume page on this topic and many hours of work; The solution was to find a line which works for both real and protected mode, without breaking either of the parsers.

Here it is:

[Disks]
d3 = "Promise FastTrak 376 Driver",\fasttx2k,\win2000,""

[Defaults]
scsi = FastTrak_TX2K_nt5

[scsi]
FastTrak_TX2K_nt5 = "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 ™ Controller", fasttx2k

[HardwareIds.scsi.FastTrak_TX2K_nt5]
id="PCI\VEN_105A&DEV_3376", "fasttx2k"

[Files.scsi.FastTrak_TX2K_nt5]
driver = d3, fasttx2k.sys, fasttx2k
inf = d3, fasttx2k.inf
catalog= d3, fasttx2k.cat

[Config.fasttx2k]
value = "", Tag, REG_DWORD, 1

Notice the comma and double quotes at the end of win2000 on d3 line, this works with real and protected mode. Now lets go back to winnt.sif file and change the massstorage section:

[MassStorageDrivers]
    "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 (tm) Controller"="fasttx2k"
    "IDE CD-ROM (ATAPI 1.2)/PCI IDE Controller" = "RETAIL"
     
[OEMBootFiles]
    TXTSETUP.OEM
    Fasttx2k.CAT
    Fasttx2k.INF
    Fasttx2k.SYS

Now add all the [oembootfiles] to the textmode folder, copy the .sys file to the i386 folder, create a folder in the $1 folder \drivers\sata\promise and copy all the [oembootfiles] to the promise folder, now that is done we need to edit the txtsetup.sif file like so:

[SourceDisksFiles]
fasttx2k.sys = 1,,,,,,3_,4,1

[HardwareIdsDatabase]
PCI\VEN_105A&DEV_3376 = "fasttx2k"

[SCSI.LOAD]
fasttx2k = fasttx2k.sys,4

[SCSI]
fasttx2k = "Win2000 Promise FastTrak 376 (tm) Controller"

Now that all this is done, burn baby burn..., it works every time. you can also do this with other controllers by just following my code. Their is no need to hack the hivesys.inf file which i"ve read about in other post.

For best regaurds start with new. The only files I hacked was txtsetup.sif and txtsetup.oem

Well done.

[GreenMachine]

A wonderful job of cut and paste!

http://www.mail-archive.com/unattended-inf...t/msg00107.html

[win2k]

I know I cut and past some of the text but I see you dont read the code very well. I'm not trying to win a medal, or take someones else's work. I'm only showing another way to edit the txtsetup.oem file. Does my code have the txtsetup.sif in the d3 line? No it dont. And the link you showed is a copy also, if you want to know who really wrote it go to this link.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message...?msg_id=5410366

I'm sorry for any mis-confusion their may be. I'm new on the forum.

win2k

[win2k]

The link you showed is the same i had.

Sorry!

win2k