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BartPE, PXE and Unattended Installs over aNetwork


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Hello all!

I have a BartPE bootable via PXE and I am attempting to do an unattended install over the network. The install starts then during 'Preparing the Installation' it goes back to 'Collecting Information' and stays there.

If I attempt to do a manual install by executing winnt32.exe, the install complains that it is out of memory after the language and accessability settings. It will actually go into an loop of asking the same questions until it just stops and won't go any further. Other functions of the boot image at this point no longer work, such as rebooting, clicking on menus, and task manager.

I have been able to boot off of CD and conduct a successful unattended install with the same image as the one used for PXE. I have tried this on systems that have 512 meg of memory up to 4 gig. I have tried this on multiple systems with varying standard hardware.

Here is my winnt.sif:

[setupData]

BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)"

BootPath = "\i386\System32\"

OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportascd /rdpath=PEBUILDER.ISO"

I have NTLDR (aka ntdetect.exe), startrom.0 and ntdetect.com from Windows 2003 SP1 in the default tftp directory.

I appreciate your patience if this has been dealt with before.

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Instead of copying the install files over the network, put your source folders on a USB drive and try to kick off the unattended install from there. You'll need to assign the USB drive a letter (I use Z:) and put the path to the $OEM$ folder in the unattend.txt in the OEMFILESPATH entry.

This will tell you if it's a networking issue or if there's something wrong with your unattended setup. I've seen broadcom nics "hang" and never really complete the install, but when the same machine is booted and the source files are located on a USB drive, everything works fine and the install proceeds normally.

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. . . put your source folders on a USB drive and try to kick off the unattended install from there.

That did not work either. It goes through the same sort of loop.

This works perfectly booting BartPE off a cd, just not when booting through PXE. :unsure:

Edited by ooky
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  • 1 month later...

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