Drive Partition During an Unattended Installation

[jdaigle]

Hello, I'm new to this forum, where I work I've been assigned the task putting together an unattended installation of Windows Server 2003. I was happy to find this website. The O/S will need to be installed on a variety of machines, some with existing multiple partitions & data, some with an existing single partition and data, and some unpartitioned. In all cases I'd like to automatically and silently repartition the single hard drive as a C Drive (~10G) and the remaining space as a D Drive before (or after) the installation of the O/S.

I've been searching the internet for a day or so and have looked at the options available in the unattend.txt file (repartition (appears to delete all partitions and create only one new partition?) and autopartition settings), but none of them seem to be able to do what I need. Is there a way do this? I've found some information where possibly a 3rd party tool can create a bootable disk to perform this task, but I'd prefer not to have two disks?

Thanks! Jeff

[Major]

You must put these lines in your Winnt.sif, it will prompt to ask you in which partition you want to install the OS and which size.

Autopartition=0

Repartition=NO

But if you want to do it all unattended, you must use diskpart.

[Takeshi]

That's not strictly accurate.

If the HD is unallocated, Autopartition =1 will still ask you first.

It's unnecessary to specify Autopartition = 0, just omit it if you don't want it set to 1.

Ref.chm:

Either omit the AutoPartition entry from your answer file or set the value of AutoPartition to 1.

Edited September 15, 2006 by Takeshi

[Major]

If the HD is unallocated, Autopartition =1 will still ask you first

Is true when you have only one HD and without partitions, Because "=1" looks for an empty hard disk or partition that does not contain any previous installation of OS, if he finds it, it does not ask, it installs inmediately, and you will have two OS. I have done all tests of the whole combinations between Autopartition, Repartition and FileSystem (without partition, with partition, with only one HD, with two HD) in order to understand it better.

P.S. Sorry i don´t understand the word "unallocated"

[Takeshi]

It just means unpartitioned.

You must have noticed that in Windows Setup, it actually uses this word "unallocated" in the partition list that you see. If I remember correctly, Disk Management also uses this term.

[Major]

Thanks Takeshi

I have not seen that word before in the setup because i install windows "spanish".