An Idea

[flyakite]

EDIT: Crap, lol, I wasn't thinking. My idea involves writing information to files on a CD or DVD, which is not possible. ****, I thought it was an interesting idea though.

Here's an idea I had that expands upon gosh's method of multiple installation volumes for regular, unattended, and OEMPreinstall options.

My idea is to write a program that operates in DOS that allows the user to choose what to install when they choose the OEMPreinstall option from the bootup menu. It would display a numbered list of items. Example:

1) Main Batch (WMP9, DirectX9, MSN Messenger 6.0)

2) Movie Maker 2

3) Hotfixes

4) Registry Tweaks

5) Applications

6) Predesigned winnt.sif

7) Install Windows XP Pro SP1

Then it would prompt the user, and if you wanted to install just hotfixes and registry tweaks, you would enter "3,4" and it would then append the hotfixes.cmd path such as %systemroot%\install\hotfixes.cmd" to winnt.sif.

You could have a winnt.sif built with everything but the GUIRunOnce entries, and then that would be the default winnt.sif. If you chose 6, it would use a renamed version of your old winnt.sif that already had all your GUIRunOnce commands and copy that over to the winnt.sif located in i386.

Also, if say "3,4,5" was entered, it would append the proper information to winnt.sif then present a new prompt with a list of applications. Example:

1) Nero 6

2) Kazaa Lite K++

3) Yahoo Messenger

4) ATI Control Panel 3.8

5) Etc....

When options were selected "1,2,3" it would write a custom applications.cmd file that adds lines like

ECHO.
ECHO Registering Nero Burning ROM...
REGEDIT /S %systemdrive%\install\Applications\Nero\register.reg
ECHO.
ECHO Installing Nero Burning ROM 6.0.0.19
ECHO Please wait...
start /wait %systemdrive%\install\Applications\Nero\nero60019.exe /silent /noreboot

ECHO.
ECHO Installing Kazaa Lite K-plus-plus 2.4.3
ECHO Please wait...
start /wait %systemdrive%\install\Applications\KazaaLite\klitekpp243e.exe /silent
ECHO.
ECHO Changing Shared Folder Path
MKDIR "C:\Program Files\Kazaa Lite K++\My Shared Folder\"
REGEDIT /S %systemdrive%\install\Applications\KazaaLite\kazaa.reg
ECHO.
ECHO Deleting Old Shared Folder
RD /S /Q "C:\My Shared Folder\"

to the applications.cmd file.

Basically, this whole method allows you to give your cd to friends or family, and if they want to use OEMPreinstall they can either choose what programs they do or do not want to install, allows them to choose whether or not they want to use your registry tweaks or they can use the Predesigned winnt.sif which will load your original winnt.sif that you've built for unattended installs. Or if you have multiple computers but you some don't have internet access you wouldn't have to install Kazaa, but you could still install say QuickTime.

This would actually be a very simple application to write, but each user here would have to write their own since we all use different layouts for our $OEM$ folder as well as just different programs. Just thought it was an interesting concept.