Unattended Installation from Ghost image

[Phil Leinster]

Ok, here's a real challenge for someone:

I want to prepare a ghost image that will install XP on
any computer I copy the image to. I plan to do this by
imaging a computer after the text portion of setup has
been carried out and putting the CD's i386 folder on the
root directory. I am not sure how I can do this without
needing a floppy with a winnt.sif file; and more
importantly, how to tell setup to look for the i386
folder on the hard drive, and not the CD. I cannot find a
switch that seems to do this; maybe I'm just not looking
hard enough (hopefully). I also plan to put several
proprietry drivers in the image. Am I right in thinking
that this must go in the \$oem$ folder within the \i386
folder? Best of luck in answering....

 

[Rob]

nothing XP is that easy . start reading up at unattended.msfn.org and
also see if you can get yourself a copy of the XP OPK documentation.

 

[Darrell Gorter[MSFT]]

Hello Phil,
You would be too late into the setup process for this to work properly.
Things like hal detection and mass storage detection have already been
done, so this wouldn't work for any machine.
The $oem$ directories would already have been copied over to the harddrive
if I recall properly, particularly if you do it from a network share. from
a network share all files are copied locally otherwise you may have to edit
the registry to change the sourcepath setting to point to a local share
rather than the cd drive.

The winnt.sif file is copied from the floppy drive to the $win_nt$.~bt
directory for text mode, then it is moved from there to the
\windows\system32\$winnt$.inf for gui mode.
Thanks,
Darrell Gorter[MSFT]

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
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