Why Do I Encounter These Intermittent Errors ?

[jetman]

I've had working unattended CDs/DVDs for over a year and a half. This forum has been HUGE resource ! However, I have two probs I can't get past:

1) For those PCs that don't have DVDs, I've copied my unattended setup into a sub-dir called \Unattended-4 on my USB hdrive, that is, the sub-dir has .\I386 and .\I386\$OEM$ inside it. When I invoke 'WINNT32 /unattend:WINNT.SIF' from the cmd line, via my BartPE system, I always get a msg box indicating WINNT.SIF is invalid or inaccessible. The file is definitely there, bec I open the cmd window on the I386 sub-dir and I can read the file w/ NOTEPAD. What gives ? Oh yeah, if I invoke WINNT32 w/o the /unattend switch, it immed comes back and reports the embedded product key in WINNT.SIF is invalid, even though I successfully use the same WINNT.SIF file when booting normally from one of my unattended CD/DVDs.

2) Once out of every ten or so installs, my unattended DVD setup goes thru the entire setup until the GUI user creation phase, then skips the new user setup, and offers to log in as Administrator. For example, I just repaired three PCs this weekend, using my curr unattended DVD. The 1st and 3rd time (coincidentatlly, two PCs w/ the same motherboard), it skipped past the GUI user creation phase and ran the RUNONCE script as admin, but the 2nd install worked normally (ie. XP prompted to create a user, then ran the RUNONCE script in the new user's context, as expected.) Whet gives ?

TIA....Jet