What version XP? Its a nightmare nowadays.

[Spart]

Hi all. I would like to start by saying thank you for the great site you have here. I run a small computer shop in northern NY. Most of what I do it seems is re-install OS's. 90% of the computers that come in my shop have operating system problems. (spy-ware virues at the top of the list.) My goal is to re-install the os and install maintance programs (spy-ware removel, virus protection, firewall) and to install all avaiable updates as well.

When I ran across your site I thought to myself this is great it could save me alot of time. After 3 days of reading your forums and asking questions I was sucessfull in creating my first unattended install of Windows XP Home OEM with SP2 a bunch of reg tweaks, change the deasktop background as well as some silent installs of some regular programs I install.

The problem I have ran into over the past 2 years is windows cd-key. I want of course to use the cd-keys that come on the side of the customers cases that come in to insure that the os is completly legal. Usally when a customer brings me there computer that don't bring the restore disks. Alot of the times they are lost or alot of cheaper machinces dont even come with them. Recovery partitions can become corrupt or hard drives fail. All of this means I have to install with my own versions of XP.

With so many versions out there now requiring a different cd-key it is very hard to tell exactly which version is on a machince. Win XP Home OEM with or with-out SP1, Retail, Upgrade, Pro. What my plan was to make indivual unatteneded cd installs of all the different versions. I have read some of the posts where people have made dvd installs with all versions on one disk. In my case this wouldnt work very well as more than 50% of the machinces that come in do-not have dvd readers.

I have used the unattended XP home disk I creadted serverl times. It worked on 5 out of the 7 I tried it on. The 2 it did not work on was because of the different version of xp thing. What I do is use my disk to re-install then when I get to desktop I change the cd-key to the customers cd-key to make it a legit os. I called Microsoft about installing this way and they told me as long as the cd-key is the one on the side of the case the os is legit. So I guess it doesnt matter how you get the os in the computer as long as its the right cd-key. Is there a way to identify what version of xp is on a machine? How about one that will not boot-up? Is there a better way to do what i'm doing period. The 5 times that the disk i made worked was great it saved alot of time and work. When the cd-key didnt work it was terrible of course because I had to use a different version xp home disk to get the cd-key to match up and start over spending twice as much time on that machince. Seems to me there has to be a better way. Any help would be aprreciated.

(wierd the indent isnt showing up)

[RyanVM]

Holy crap, learn how to use the enter key. Paragraphs are you friend.

And you're probably going to want to visit this subforum as it seems to be more suited to the questions you're asking (at least, from what I could decipher from that).

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=82

Unfortunately, it sounds like you do need both XP Pro and XP Home on one CD/DVD. That's certainly doable. You can leave the CD key out of winnt.sif so you can type it in during setup. That's what I personally do as I use my unattended CD on many people's computers. Whether or not the computer came from the OEM with SP1 integrated shouldn't matter - an XP Home key is an XP Home key regardless of the service pack integrated into it.

[^_^]

I scripted my unattended setup to use a floppy.

For the user login info on the autologon.reg and user account.cmd, I put a reference to a:\useraccount.cmd in the cmdlines.txt

XP setup will always look to the floppy for the winnt.sif file, so I put that file right on the floppy, as well as the rest of the batch files to run the unattended setup right thru the programs installs

Another way to do it is to use the CDIMAGE.EXE that is listed on this forum somewhere to create an ISO image file to use as source to burn a cd or dvd

I'd write some tutorial on it if there's enough intrest, or I could just post my files for people to analyze