Simple Unattended Install Issue Has Me Hung

[User0101]

Well gang I have what I'm sure is a simple question for you seasoned veterans out there. A little history first... Been performing unattended installs since Win2K by the old manual ways before such great programs like nLite came out and what now. So, I have the basic skill sets plus some putting me comfortably at an intermediate skill level I'd say.

Here's what I'm looking to do that I cant seem to solve.

Looking to perform an unattended install of WinXP (created like a million of these before) that does (2) additional things either before the first login or at the first login. I do not care which.

1) Import one registry key that sets XP's SourcePath to the C:\ drive.

Example:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup]

"SourcePath"="C:\\"

**********

2) Copy the I386 folder from the CD over to the C:\ drive.

Example:

XCOPY %cdrom%\I386 C:\I386 /E /Q

**********

To me this seems like it should be easy to take care of and I can see where using the $OEM$ with cmdlines.txt would probably accomplish the job except I have one problem there, I'm not using the $OEM$ folders for this particular unattended install because I have to use the F6 option during install and I do not want to integrate the drivers on this disk. I require the

So, I've dug through RunOnceEx.cmd and various INF files and cant find a single way to accomplish these two basic tasks. Let me rephrase, the registry import can be easily accomplished I know. I just have no clue how to perform the batch file command to copy the I386 folder from the CD to the C:\. Hopefully someone has come across a similar scenario and can assist here.

I certainly appreciate any help that you can provide.

User0101

[Yzöwl]

You could kill two birds with one stone if you copied over and installed from 'dos'!

[User0101]

Good one. Granted that's not exactly what I'm looking to accomplish.

Thanks all the same.

[User0101]

Solution Found!

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=17915

God I love this place.

User0101

[Yzöwl]

It may look like a solution, but I doubt that you will be able to copy an entire I386 directory from a batch file ran at cmdlines.txt.

[RyanVM]

There's always ways to get around limitations in the XP install scheme. For example, you can always just add files to txtsetup.sif to be copied during textmode setup rather than using $OEM$ folders. You can also make use of svcpack.inf, which gets executed regardless of whether or not setup is unattended. And you can edit the registry hives with runonce entries which would then be exectuted during windows setup. Or you can create an INF to be executed when sysoc.inf is called during setup to do a lot of work for you.

I use a combination of a little of all of those little tidbits to accomplish a lot of fun stuff without requiring an unattended CD

Edited April 5, 2006 by RyanVM

[Yzöwl]

There are many ways to skin a rabbit.

For the task you have in mind however, the problem will be finding one willing to hang around long enough for the task to complete.

Hence my first response.