Hopefully someone can help me as im struggling a litte. I have a working xp unattended install, but at the request of someone else i need to call a .bat file to display a startup message at the beginning of the install. So far i have created a bootable DOS CD that does this. The CD also contains the xp setup files and i am calling the winnt.exe from the batch file after the user has hit a key. The command line i am using for starting the winnt.exe install is:

d:\i386\winnt.exe /u:d:\i386\winnt.sif /s:d:\i386

This starts the unattended install but it immediatley stops with an error saying 'An internal error has occured. Could not find a place for the swap file'

It seems like it is not performing the auto partition and format before attempting to start the installation and therfore does not have a c drive to copy the files to. I know my winnt.sif is good because it works fine when i create the cd image with nlite and boot straight into the unattended setup.

Either im doing something wrong, or perhaps there are differences in the way winnt.exe and winnt32.exe start the install process. Any suggestions would be fantastic!

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post.

When you do it this way you have to already have a valid FAT partition on the system for some files to be written to the hard disk.

Ahhh, that makes sense. I assumed it would work in the same way as the winnt32.exe. I did think about doing the fdisk'ing and formating from within my batch. only problem is it has to be NTFS. There is also another issue i thought of. Once the installation has completed coping the files from the CD to the c drive it reboots and needs to boot from the c drive to continue the installation. At the moment it will just keep booting back to my CD, and running the batch file over and over. The normal windows installation seems to get around this by adding the boot up message to the beginnning of the cd saying 'Press any key to boot from cd', then if you dont it boots from the HD. I dont have this and so far havent been able to figure out how to do it.

Take a look at BartPE.