It seemed like an pretty good and interesting idea at the time, and for the
most part it works. I've run into one fairly major and annoying snag
though.

The idea is this: Use BartsPE Builder CD to give me a 32bit WinXp
environment (since we can't get WinPE), and plugins to support vbscript and
VB executables. With that I can create an interface to ask the installer
the few relavent questions (hardware name, user, location) which would
generate the unattend file and fire up Winnt32 referencing it.

The whole scheme as it runs thus far is this: BartPE loads up, fire up a
command prompt and cscript xpinstall.vbs. First it examines the hard disk
and formats it via DiskPart (I've done both NTFS and Fat32), assigns it to
drive C:, marks it as active.

The VB executable pops up and asks the questions, confirms the answers,
creates the unattend.txt file and puts in it C:\i386. With room being tight
on the BartPE CD, I cab'd the i386 folder onto the CD. The vbscript
extracts it to the C:\i386 folder.

The vbscript then runs the C:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C:
/unattend:C:\i386\unattend.txt /debug4:debug.log.

All is joyous so far, unattend works fine, no questions pop up, but winnt32
doesn't do the reboot. It also turns the C: drive's active flag off....
wierd. Anyway, the root has the 2 $win_nt$ folders, ntdetect, boot.ini
(hidden), ntldr, everything that looks like it should be bootable.

But it won't boot to the hard drive. No messages, no nothing, just hangs...
So far I've been doing this on Virtual PC, and I'm so glad because I've
changed the ISO so many times trying to narrow down the problem I'd be
forever erasing and burning cd-rw's...

Any ideas? I've run out of them myself, has anyone else tried to do this or
something similar? I'd be happy to share my programs with anyone or the
group upon request...

Thanks in advance!
-Scott

"Scott Fenstermacher" <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

> The whole scheme as it runs thus far is this: BartPE loads up, fire
> up a command prompt and cscript xpinstall.vbs. First it examines
> the hard disk and formats it via DiskPart (I've done both NTFS and
> Fat32), assigns it to drive C:, marks it as active.

So far, so good.

> All is joyous so far, unattend works fine, no questions pop up, but
> winnt32 doesn't do the reboot. It also turns the C: drive's active
> flag off.... wierd. Anyway, the root has the 2 $win_nt$ folders,
> ntdetect, boot.ini (hidden), ntldr, everything that looks like it
> should be bootable.

Not so good. Most boot loaders, including Microsoft's, want to boot
the first active partition.

> But it won't boot to the hard drive. No messages, no nothing, just
> hangs... So far I've been doing this on Virtual PC, and I'm so glad
> because I've changed the ISO so many times trying to narrow down the
> problem I'd be forever erasing and burning cd-rw's...

Well, you missed a step, which is to populate the Master Boot Record
(MBR) with a valid boot loader. Under DOS, you would run "fdisk
/mbr". Under the XP recovery console, you would use "fixmbr". I do
not know what you should use from BartPE.

This will give you a Microsoft boot loader in the MBR, which will look
for an active partition to chain-boot.

> Any ideas? I've run out of them myself, has anyone else tried to do
> this or something similar? I'd be happy to share my programs with
> anyone or the group upon request...

Well, I suggest you take a look at my system. It already does what
you are attempting, except it installs from the network (better than
CD), is written in Perl (better than VB), and uses DOS or Linux to
bootstrap. Adapting it to boot with BartPE might be interesting,
although I do not think it would gain much.

See <http://unattended.sourceforge.net/>.

- Pat
MVP, Windows Server - Setup/Deployment