winxp unattended installation - mounted partitions

[indianya]

I am a newbie as far windows xp sys admin is concerned but after getting help from this website I was able to perform winxp unattended installation successfully.

I wanted "program files" and "Documents and settings" folder on a separate partition.

I was able to do that by creating 3 partitions and formating each of those as NTFS filesystem prior to setup and then by using winnt.sif answer file during unattended windows xp install.

My final installation looked like

C:/Windows Partition 1

D:/Program files Partition 2

E:/Documents and settings. Partition 3

However my real goal is to have "Program Files" and "Documents and settings" folder on a mounted partition and that to happen during unattended installation. So that the final windows xp installation looks like this

C:/Windows Partition 1

C:/Program Files Partition 2 (mounted as folder c:/program files during unattended install)

C:/Documents and settings Partition 3 (mounted as folder c:/D & S during unattended install)

I tried using diskpart but for some reason it doesn't give me all the options as advertised to select and mount partition etc.

I would like to know if above can be done and if yes then some guidance would be helpful. Also if someone can tell me the setup and bootup sequence of windows xp that would be useful information.

thanks

indianya

[indianya]

Since no one replied let me ask the question again.

Can someone tell if it is possible to perform mountvol/diskpart during windows xp setup and then use the mounted partition for special folders such as program files and documents and settings?

Final windows xp installation should look like this

C:/Windows on partition 1

C:/Program Files on partition 2 (mounted as folder c:/program files during unattended install)

C:/Documents and settings on partition 3 (mounted as folder c:/D & S during unattended install)

[SwedenXP]

3 C:\ drives? Is that equivalent of a split personality??? (sorry for the joke)

My suggestions is that You;

Keep Windows om C:\Windows

Keep Your programs on C:\Programs

And if You want Your Documents and Setting on a seperat drive do so (ie D:\Documents and Settings).

Good luck

/ SwedenXP B)

[homiebrah]

Although I can understand a few of the benefits of installing programs on a separate partition, it would still be useless to do so, IMHO.

Reason being is that if Progs are on D, and the OS is on C, what happens when the OS becomes corrupt and a reinstall is needed? The OS does not know the Progs are on D, and accessing them would not work, since the registry entries for them do not exist, nor the registering of .dll's, .ocx's, etc.

I could see this as a logical setup. OS on C, Profiles on D, and the swap file on E.

[DanaGoyette]

I'm trying to do the same thing, even if I have to manually attend the diskpart portion to make partitioning not be hardcoded. I have my paritions set up as:

C: (root)

D: (mydocs) -- mount under U\(user name) manually AFTER install

P: ("program files")

U: (users/docs&settings)

drive letters won't matter if mountings are guaranteed, and then I'll be able to use the autolettering script in RunOnceEx

I need to ensure that these mappings are created before the beginning of setup(using the setupORG and preinstall.cmd method), and persist throughout the entire setup, so that I won't get in a catch-22 of being unable to move stuff to other partition to mount.

I can do the drive letter changing later manually or as a script as long as this mounting is guaranteed to work. The same goes for registry search&replace later.

at some point I may direct allusers to my profile so I don't have to deal with the distinction

This is somewhat urgent -- my current XP install is getting a bit screwy, and I'd really like to reinstall some time this week!

Edited December 15, 2005 by DanaGoyette

[Takeshi]

Have you tried the net use command at all?

Edited December 16, 2005 by Takeshi

[DanaGoyette]

I don't see exactly what NET USE will do for me; it seems to be for network shares. What I want is the DISKPART command

ASSIGN	  - Assign a drive letter or mount point to the selected volume.

Here's my partition table

(note, there is a 9.542 GB space between end of extended and start of next; that was an error on my part, and I don't know if PartitionMagic can safely make it larger)

Partition ###  Type			  Size	 Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1	Primary			 23 GB	32 KB (C:)
  Partition 2	Extended		   149 GB	23 GB 
  Partition 3	Logical			  9 GB	23 GB  (U:) (mount to c:\docs&settings)
  Partition 4	Logical			 47 GB	33 GB  (P:) (mount to c:\Program Files)
  Partition 5	Logical			 93 GB	79 GB  (D:) (mydocs, deal with it later)
  Partition 6	Unknown		   1028 MB   182 GB (Linux Swap)
  Partition 7	Unknown			 50 GB   183 GB (Linux reiserfs)

Oh yeah, all I'd consider formatting would be U:.

Who thought of "documents and settings" and "program files"? that takes too long to type! Why not just "Users" and "Programs"? Well, at least "Docume~1" and "Progra~1" work.

I really do prefer the \home, \usr, \opt, etc... that Unix/Linux/BSD uses.

My thinking is that it'll be easier to mount the folders at the start and leave drive letters how they are, rather than having to move the CD drive to F. What this will do is move the specific folders to their own partitions in a way that is transparent to the install. Later, I'll do the actual registry settings so I don't get "access denied" messages when dealing in the start menu due to the Recycle Bin's complete ignorance of mountings.

I'm just wondering, if I put a call to diskpart in the preinstall.cmd, will I be able to set up the mountings and then resume the install and have the mounting remain? Also, what would I need to do to enable the use of diskpart at that stage?

PS: Wow, while I was busy mucking around editing this post someone else responded. I'm slow!

Edited December 16, 2005 by DanaGoyette

[No6]

I tried using diskpart but for some reason it doesn't give me all the options as advertised to select and mount partition etc.

I still think that DiskPart is your way out but it'll take some work. If you follow http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=18087 it may shed some light into how to go about doing it. Hope it helps.

[Takeshi]

Yep, I forgot net use is for network shares.

Diskpart has

assign mount=path

command, has that been tried?

[DanaGoyette]

I'm just wondering, if I put a call to diskpart in the preinstall.cmd, will I be able to set up the mountings and then resume the install and have the mounting remain? Also, what would I need to do to enable the use of diskpart at that stage?

I'm rather new to this unattended install process; I've used nLite but I think that's caused a few problems in my current install.

I'm already setting up drivers; All I need help with is enabling myself to set up the mappings manually before any files are copied to those two special folders. I'd think actually changing the drive letters (including the CD drive) at that point could break things. I don't want to break my system during the install.

Edit: I just tried it in a virtual machine. It works! The command prompt came up properly before the "Welcome screen" style install portion. I'd like to be able to automatically have the command prompt echo something like "Use this chance to set up drive mountings as you like" or something.

I only got one error: AcGenral.dll failed to copy even though it's on the ISO and it does extract from the compressed version with WinRAR.

Of course, I'm expecting driver installs to fail. MS Virtual PC sure has an odd, mix of old hardware (emulated). Athlon XP + i440BX -- you don't see that every day!

Now I just need to get rid of those "OMG New Start Menu!!!" banners -- maybe I'll switch to classic install.

Edit again: Oh yeah, after testing, I found that RunOnceEx.cmd WASN'T run for some reason. I guess I have more testing to do.

Edited December 17, 2005 by DanaGoyette