possibilities for an unattended setup

[vci]

i'm working for a small company beside my community service

there we need to set up:

desktop pcs and notebooks

we always used the unattended setup from unattended.sourceforge.net which has some advantages, but also some disadvantages:

-no possibility for sata drives (new notebooks = sata drive)

-very often windows has no network drivers for notebooks

for desktop pcs the unattended setup works fine, but for notebooks ...

okay, almost any notebook we get is the same type, so imaging is an option for us

but is there no chance of an unattended setup for notebooks?

another problem is the software shipped with these notebooks (HP Compaq nc6xxx)

what i want is a very flexible unattended setup where i can tick options or whatever i want to ...

[bj-kaiser]

you should get Microsofts WAIK, with that you get the documentation for Vista's unattended setup methods and (most important) Windows PE 2.0, and Microsofts diskimager 'imagex'.

All you need to setup to boot a WinPE 2.0 image through PXE is a DHCP and TFTP server. For my experiments I use a Debian box as server (dnsmasq for dhcp and hpa's tftpd).

To make building a PE image easier, you should have a look at Winbuilder and VistaPE (www.boot-land.net).

So, now you got the platform from which you can do your installations.

If you want to automate things, you can use Windows scripting (or basically everything that runs on Windows).

For my part I decided to mix AutoIt (a freeware scripting tool for windows) with SQLite as database. Downside is, since we are at work still deploying XP with PQ DriveImage, I have not yet had the pressure to finish my ideas. But if there is enough interest, I can probably work out at least the imagex part of my script set.

What I can get working in soon time is automated imagex, but software installation after the initial Windows installlation in unattended's style will still take some time to implement (but the idea is there).