Idea about unattended install from flash drive

[selyb]

I've searched and found a wealth of info on this stuff, mostly from Jaclaz but I haven't found everything I'm looking for and I didn't want to bring back old posts

now, please correct me if i'm wrong, my impression is that the latest state you can have the install process that is still unspecific to each machine is when the boot record has been written and the hdd contains $WIN_NT$.~BT and $WIN_NT$.~LS

what i mean by this is that any part of the process done after this state could not be copied to another machine with different hardware, correct?

so, my idea is to use "winnt32.exe /makelocalsource /noreboot" to produce these folders then 7zip them

on my usb stick, i want to have a batch script format a drive to ntfs, give it the boot record that xp setup would have given it by this point, and extract the 7z of the folders to that drive

i dont have a preference between dos or linux but, as of yet, i havent found a 16-bit version of 7zip

i don't know how to give the hdd the boot record it needs

also, can someone confirm for me that it doesnt matter if the setup files are cabbed or not? it's possible that 7-zip will give better compression if the files are not compressed already

if anyone is curious about my reason for wanting to go this way, here are some benefits:

1. after the files are copied, setup continues from the hdd so the flash drive isnt needed anymore

2. no files are deleted from the flash drive during setup

3. the setup files will take less space this way

4. different installations could be scripted using the same setup files by extracting different sets of files