Microsoft Windows 2000 Unattended

[Scruge]

Oh, I forgot heres what MS instructed....

• To start Windows 2000 Setup in unattended Setup mode from the Windows 2000 product CD

1. The computer must support booting from the CD-ROM drive—El Torito No Emulation CD boot support.

2. The answer file must be named Winnt.sif and must be placed on a floppy disk to be inserted as soon as the computer boots from the CD.

The Winnt.sif answer file may also be placed on and run from a bootable CD. For more information about creating a bootable CD, see KB article Q167685, “How to Create an El Torito Bootable CD-ROM” at the Microsoft Product Support Services Web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/

3. The answer file must contain a [Data] section with the required keys specified. For more information, see “[Data],” later in this document.

[Scruge]

Oh, I forgot heres what MS instructed....

• To start Windows 2000 Setup in unattended Setup mode from the Windows 2000 product CD

1. The computer must support booting from the CD-ROM drive—El Torito No Emulation CD boot support.

2. The answer file must be named Winnt.sif and must be placed on a floppy disk to be inserted as soon as the computer boots from the CD.

The Winnt.sif answer file may also be placed on and run from a bootable CD. For more information about creating a bootable CD, see KB article Q167685, “How to Create an El Torito Bootable CD-ROM” at the Microsoft Product Support Services Web site:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/

3. The answer file must contain a [Data] section with the required keys specified. For more information, see “[Data],” later in this document.

Found the answer to my own question, funny how ms can send people on wild goose chases. All deployment info I read from MS instructed the use of unicode.

Article 304305

SYMPTOMS

When you are performing an unattended Windows 2000 installation by using a Winnt.sif file, you may receive the following error message:

Line 1 of the INF file is invalid.

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

CAUSE

This issue can occur if the Winnt.sif file was created by using an encoding scheme other than ANSI. The Winnt.sif file does not work if it is encoded with any of the following encoding formats:

Unicode

Unicode Big Endian

UTF-8