Formatting from dos?

[Timorad]

What I want:

I want an unattended setup. First it needs to make several partitions. A batch file is run, asking for serial & username, and then making winnt.sif answer file. Windows needs to start after that using the winnt.sif answer file, format the drives, and start setup.

What I have:

The CD boots a dos environment, starting a tool which partitions the hard disk in the way I want (NOTE: Partition, not format). It also creates a RAM-drive. After that a batch file is started, which ask for serial, un, and so on. It writes this info to an winnt.sif file, which is then created on the RAM-drive. So far so good.

The Problem:

This is where the problem kicks in. I try to start the windows setup by executing winnt.exe (Ofcourse with the command switches to use the new winnt.sif). However, windows starts to complain there is not enough space available, which is quite logical considering there are no formated partitions.

When the setup started from the normal CD, it was possible to format the drives in NTSF through the setup,and unattended. Why not now?

Is there a possibility to start the windows formating tool from a dos-environment?

Note: For reference, here is a section from my winnt.sif:

[DiskConfig] 
 Disk1 = "Disk1.config" 
 Disk2 = "Disk2.config" 
 Disk3 = "Disk3.config" 

[Disk1.config] 
 Size1=* 
 PartitionType1=primary 
 FileSystem1=ntfs 
 Quickformat1=yes 

[Disk2.config] 
 Size2=* 
 PartitionType2=logical 
 FileSystem2=ntfs
 Quickformat2=yes 

[Disk3.config] 
 Size3=* 
 PartitionType3=logical 
 FileSystem3=ntfs 
 Quickformat3=yes

[Jazkal]

creating partitions from dos, I use gdisk.exe. It is a partition tool from Symantec, comes with ghost. If you don't have that then you can use some other ones, not sure which, because I haven't used DOS is at least 2 years, moved everything to WinPE to do what you describe, easier to work with IMO.

[Timorad]

creating partitions from dos, I use gdisk.exe. It is a partition tool from Symantec, comes with ghost. If you don't have that then you can use some other ones, not sure which, because I haven't used DOS is at least 2 years, moved everything to WinPE to do what you describe, easier to work with IMO.

The partitioning is not the problem, the formatting is. gdisk.exe cannot format into NTFS, and I don't think any program is able to do that from dos. The only solution is therefore the windows setup.

[tevoy]

You can try Aefdisk. It is a command line shareware util which handles partitoning and file formatting.

I have used PowerQuest Drive Image Pro to run scripts from the dos rescue disk set environment. You need the pro version (corporate) which supports scripting. Retail versions lack this feature. Think it was version 5.5 or greater that had this.

Also as previously stated gdisk. But you will have to invoke the 'convert' utility to move from fat32 to NTFS.