Help with answer file

[SubD]

hi, i have a question about the unattended answer file, i was wondering if anyone would be able to help me out, im looking to find out what to put so i will have two partitions, NTFS, 1 partition 10gigs, and the other 150gigs.

tks

SetupMgrTag

[Data]

AutoPartition=1

MsDosInitiated="0"

UnattendedInstall="Yes"

[IcemanND]

Can't do it with the answer file, at least not unattended. You need to boot to dos, winpe or bartpe to accomplish this.

Or if fully unattended is not a requirement you can have it stop on the drive installation screen and select partition sizes manually.

[Mordac85]

You could also use something like Ghost's Gdisk utility in a batch or script to create your partitions and then kick off the unattended install to the first partition.

More complex, but IcemanND is right. M$ didn't design the answer file to be that flexible.

[313361669]

DOSE The Ghost hurt MY hard disk?

[Mordac85]

Depends on what you call 'hurt'. Gdisk is like a command line version of fdisk. You can wipe a drive, re-partition it, hide or activate partitions, etc all from the command line. Of course this will mean any data is pretty much unrecoverable unless you backed up the original parition table.

The thing is to perform these additional steps you have to move to a scripted solution b/c the unattended answer file doesn't cover it all. It would be nice if it had a section for running commands BEFORE the unattended setup they way they did for after it, but it just wasn't a major concern for Microsoft to build in such functionality since a batch file does the same thing.

[Zxian]

Moved to Unattended Forum.

[waves]

You could also use something like Ghost's Gdisk utility in a batch or script to create your partitions and then kick off the unattended install to the first partition.

More complex, but IcemanND is right. M$ didn't design the answer file to be that flexible.

How is this done? I have ghost and would like to create 2 partitions:

C: most of disk

D: only 4 gigs

[Mordac85]

Use a line for each action you want gdisk to run:

rem Wipe the drive
gdisk 1 /del /all

rem Clear the boot record
gdisk 1 /mbr

rem Create a 4GB partition at the end of the drive
gdisk 1 /cre /pri /sz:4000 /end

rem Create a system partition w/the rest
gdisk 1 /cre /pri /sure

rem Make the first partition active
gdisk 1 /act /p:1

I'm not sure, and you'd have to test it, but I think you may need to reboot before running the unattended install so the partitions are visible to the Windows setup.

Edited May 23, 2006 by Mordac85

[waves]

Thanks, Mordac85. I understand what you did. How do I incorporate this into something that will autostart when I insert the cd, and then install my unattended setup? I don't care if it has to reboot. It will still be unattended, right? I would also like to add the installation of ghost itself to the c drive, and, if possible, have the unattended install make a ghost image from the c partition and save it on the d partition. I think I need some type of batch file with bartpe that will instruct the pc exactly what to do, but I'm not sure how to go about this. Thanks.

[Mordac85]

Like I said, I'm not sure if you can do it all in one step. If you need to reboot after creating the partitions you'll have to create some kind of detection routine in your batch to automate the process. Maybe parse the output of gdisk /status to look for your partitons?

As for installing Ghost that's no problem, but you don't have to install it to make an image of a drive or partition. For an immediate Ghost backup to the D partition you'll have to do that with another boot disk since you can't image the partition you booted from. Bartpe or a DOS floppy will do tho.