Possible to increase Unattened install speed?

[caouette]

I've been using an unattended install of XP for a while now, and one of the biggest complaints I have heard is that it simply takes too long to run the install. It still takes the standard 45 minutes to install XP. The techs working with me love the fact that we now have 1 "image" to maintain, rather than a bunch of sysprep'd ghost images. However, they really want to be able to deploy a new machine in about 20 minute, like ghost could.

Anyway, at the upcoming "Windows Connections 2006" conference, Douglas Spindler is supposed to reveal how we can reduce installation time to 15 minutes. See here: http://www.devconnections.com/shows/WinSpr...lt.asp?c=1&s=73

My question is... how could he be doing this? I'm going to try to go the the conference, but I want to see if our collective minds can figure out a similar solution.

Any ideas?

-Mike Caouette

[BoardBabe]

I'm guessing he is stripping the source quite alot

[jondercik]

You could still ghost the machine and as long as all drivers are integrated you should be fine, as long as you tell mini-setup to run through PNP again mass storage drivers again.

[mmarable]

To be honest, I expect that he's going to talk about automating the installation and not much more. I wouldn't expect a whole lot out of this. An automated install of Windows will run in about 15 minutes or less, so what ever he's promoting isn't anything record breaking.

A typical installation takes around 45 minutes and requires a techie to answer questions during the installation process.

So, he's basing his benchmark against someone manually going through and doing an hand install. He's going to probably talk about the free tools like the deployment tools included on the Windows CD and how you can create aWinNT.sif file. It's so great and...

...AD or SMS is not required.

I would not get your hopes up too much and expect any great Microsoft secrets to be divulged.

[chris4869]

Caouette, you can cut your installation down to less than 20 minutes (without apps) depending on the speed of your computer. It takes around 15-20 minutes on my P2.8 Ghz (this includes patches). You need to use your unattended install with ghost.

Try this:

1. Perform your unattended install on a pc. Let the system transfer all the OS files to the $win_nt$.~bt, $win_nt$.~ls, and $ temp locations. Don't worry about where it copies the files. The file transfer is the cause of your slow unattended installation. You need to make a ghost image of your Windows unattended installation after the FIRST reboot.

* You need a boot disk that boots your system to a server. *

2. Insert your boot disk while waiting for step 1 to complete. When the file transfer from step 1 is completed, your pc will boot up to your boot disk. Make an image of your pc and store it somewhere on your server. This will be the ghost image that you will use from now on.

* To setup a new computer, use your boot disk to connect to your server and load the image from step 2. The installation will start at the setup stage instead of the tedious file transfer that has nothing to do with hardware/configuration setup.

Try it and let us know.

[Wraith]

I have achieved an install of around 6 minutes, using a sysprep image, stored within a WIM file from the WAIK. I apply this by booting into WindowsPE, and using the WIM from there.

It doesn't help if you need to install on multiple HAL's, but if you've got a script to sort that out after the rest of the OS is applied, then it's not too much of a problem.

[baronvonfoxbat7734]

Using NLite and the BTS Drivers and wiothout removing hardly anything, I get a 20 minute disk. No patches or apps though... Just standard XP with SP2 and the drivers and a few apps like AVG and Winrar copied to the root and installed afterwards by hand. I did do the 2000 interface for the setup and a few things like that but it is 20 minutes on any machine I put it on from Laptops to desktops.