anyone performing unattended setup local from hd ?

[EMKAY]

I fancy creating a restorable disk image (using something like ghost) that is basically a 4gb fat32 drive partition with the all XP SP2 media; application ad installation scripts stored locally.

This would be like the computers that ship with a recovery partition, the image is restored and then the unattended install of xp would be initiated.

I wouldn't need to worry about the $OEM$ structure because all the files would already be in the right place and the I386 source files would remain locally on the hard disk if the user wanted to add additional components.

A few issues encountered already -

1. can't seem to use cmdlines.txt

2. winnt.exe first seems to copy all the files again to a temp directory - is there something that can tell it it's files are local already and cut down on this time ?

3. sourcepath in registry still reflects that it has been installed from a cdrom

4. boot.ini leaves entries behind for previous versions of windows

any help appreciated,

thanks,

Em Kay

[Martin Zugec]

Well, if I understand right, U R not using right strategy - U should create typical unattended, but personalize OOBE for specific user settings (thats the way that companies like HP, Dell etc. use)

[EMKAY]

1. can't use cmdlines.txt

fixed this, you still need $oem$ under the I386 directory to use cmdlines.txt

everything seems to be working great - just need to stop windows copying all the files from c:\I386 to a temp directory during the text setup mode

how can I convince it all the required files are already in c:\i386 ??

thanks,

Em Kay

[prathapml]

@EMKAY

Hey, here's exactly what you might be looking for... You will have a huge saving of time too in your case, if you follow the reducing size of source method by gosh. Of course, he refers to a CD.... you should make use of such instructions in the context of your install from HD.