XP PRO unattended installation from CD freezes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Onewa
  • Start date Start date
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Onewa

Hi,

I'm trying to do an unattended installation from a CD (so I can have
documents and settings on D:)

What I've got is:
- Asus P4P800 MB with 2.8G Pentium 4, 512MB
- A 30G hard drive formatted with two FAT32 partitions
- A Windows 98 boot disk with the unattend.bat generated by setupmgr.exe. I
changed winnt32.exe to winnt.exe and tweaked the paths.
- A pretty vanilla unattend.txt generated by setupmgr.exe. I just added the
profilesdir to the GuiUnattended section, pointing to drive D:

I boot from the the W98 floppy and launch unattend.bat. Setup runs and says
"Please wait while Setup copies files to your hard disk.". It copies a whole
bunch of files, and then . . . nothing.

The hard drive light is on, but not flashing. It seems pretty much hung
(waited 35 minutes).

Ever hopeful, I try booting from the hard drive. Setup boots, and then says
it doesn't see a system to upgrade from and needs to see a W98, W2K, etc.
CD. Don't know why, 's new machine that came with XP. I put a W98 CD in (why
not), and it says there is not enough memory to install XP.

So, I'm stuck.

I have made the hard drive bootable (tried W98 and XP on it), and I have run
XP for a while (playing flying sims) so I'm pretty sure the hardware works.

So maybe there are subtleties to this unattended installation from a CD that
aren't obvious from the docs. I've poked through Microsoft.com, but didn't
anything that applied to my situations.

Any suggestions/help would be appreciated.

/Onewa
 
Just found kb296814, turns out I needed to run smartdrv.

Figures, just after I push the panic button . . .
 
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