Installing on multiple machines

[Tekcare]

I'm currently about to build a large number of identical Windows XP based systems to be sold to a number of different clients. I've been looking for ways of saving myself from having to specify all the various settings for each one and came across the guide for Unattended Installations. This appears to be what I'm looking for, except that it seems to imply that Windows should be installed from the same disc each time. This doesn't seem possible since each machine will have to have its own Windows license and product key, unless of course it's perfectly acceptable to install the same copy of Windows on a large number of machines, which I really doubt.

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree, in which case is there an alternative method to have all the windows settings carried over from an existing machine to a new one? The windows unattended installation seems to be missing a fair few options, such as fully customisable regional settings, power settings, display font size settings and a few other things which are part of the spec to which I need to adhere. On the other hand, this Unattended Installation method does seem very useful, especially the part about installing drivers and software automatically. I'm still not clear as to how that should work though, is the idea that you store all the setup files and driver files on some central folder that can be browsed to across the network from the new machine once windows is installed? But that wouldn't work because you'd need the ethernet controller drivers on the machine, and those come from the motherboard CD, not the Windows CD.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

[PaCiNoLiFe]

At my old company we used a corporate copy of windows xp professional in which we purchased a set number of licenses to avoid having any legal battles. We had a contract with Dell who supplied the desktops. All machines were identical so we created an updated Windows XP CD SP2 + (RVMUpdatePack1.2Full-all current hotfixes) and all hardware drivers with NLITE. You can do alot more of what you seem to require just read up on nlite at the link provided and the nlite forum here at msfn is awesome if you have any questions. We then installed our newly created disk on one machine and used norton ghost to clone an image of the HDD to the other machines HDD. This proved to be a very quick setup process rather than going to each machine in our case. Those are just my two cents though I bet there are even more efficient ways if you use a server to deploy an image or something to all machines over a network. Hope this puts you in the right direction though.

[bfletch]

Whenever you create your Winn.sif file just leave the Reg. key empty and it will prompt you to enter that certain key. It therefore is only semi-unattended install.