XP unattended setup

[mepaco]

I recently found out about the automatic setup feature of XP. For those who are unaware of this here is the post that informed me:

Dear Help Station,

How do I get an unattended setup to work? I've created an answer file using Setupmgr off the XP Pro CD but I don't know how to get the unattended setup working.

Love PC User -- keep up the good work.

-- Luke Amott, Dingley, VIC



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Hi Luke ,



There are two ways to use the answer file for an unattended installation of Windows XP:

1.Copy the answer file created by the wizard to a floppy disk. If you're running Windows XP/2000/NT 4.0/Me/9x put the Windows XP CD and the floppy in their respective drives, click Start, Run and type

d:\i386\winnt32 /s:d:\i386 /unattend:a:\unattend.txt

and press Enter, where d: represents the letter for your CD drive and unattend.txt represents the name of your answer file.

Alternatively you can boot the PC with a DOS floppy with CD-ROM support, put the Windows XP CD and the floppy with the answer file in their respective drives, type

d:\i386\winnt /s:d:\i386 /u:a:\unattend.txt

and press Enter.

2. If your PC can boot from the CD drive, rename the answer file to winnt.sif before copying it to a floppy disk. Then put the Windows XP CD and the floppy in their respective drives and restart your PC.

For the benefit of others, the CD for both Windows XP Professional and Home Edition contains a selection of utilities (COM or EXE) and Help files (CHM) for enabling various forms of automatic installation of Windows XP. To use the utilities, double-click D:\Support\Tools\Deploy.cab, select all the files (or just the ones you want) and copy them to a folder on your hard disk. Running Setupmgr.exe opens the Microsoft Setup Manager Wizard that steps you through a simulated installation and creates an answer file. Windows XP Setup uses the answer file instead of waiting for your input from the keyboard.

-- Link Harris

My question is, has anyone else used this? Is there anyway to have it automatically install my drivers from my second drive that doesn't get formatted? Is there a good place to go to learn about how to use this utility better?

[JoshT]

I use a custom winnt.sif to install Windows 2000 Pro for machines on my network, works great, the only I manually have to do is partition the drive (I could do this automatically as one single partition filling the entire drive, but we standardized on two - C: for Windows & Program and D: for user's files). I just need to edit the Computer Name and IP Address in the file, but I wrote a perl script to do that quick.