custom windows installation cd

[Guest]

Hi

I am looking for information on how to create a windows installation CD
which would install a full up to date version of windows along with various
other programs needed, e.g office, antivirus etc. I have found information on
adding service packs/updates but not additional software. disk images are no
good, as it is for disaster recovery of machines with different motherboards
etc. and remote installation is no good due to the computers being in a
different location to our server.

If anyone could point me to any information on how to do this (if its
possible!) it would be most appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Dan

 

[Oli Restorick [MVP]]

Hi there

I documented a method a while ago for doing this.

www.willowhayes.co.uk/windows2000/custom.doc

This is for Windows 2000, but the methods are the same for Windows XP. Take
a look at http://bink.nu/xpbootcd for XP documentation (not including apps).

For the application part of the installation, I would recommend you look at
the following resources:

http://www.appdeploy.com/ (which has a good list of applications and how to
script them)
http://www.msfn.org/ (some great stuff being discussed here)
http://unattended.sourceforge.net (take a look at the application
installation scripting here)

I hinted at a method using GUIRunOnceEx in my documentation. I would warn
against using this. It looks nice, but it has some limitations. In
particular, if you deploy Office 2003 using a group policy, it seems to
interrupt the processing of GUIRunOnce.

Hope this helps

Oli