Hello,
I am currently trying out Unattended. Depending on which PC I try it
on, it works nice...
My biggest problem up to now has been pre-installing drivers. We have
very diverse hardware, and the first system I tried it on (an Asus
Pundit PH3, Intel-based) has an elaborate directory structure for the
device drivers (totalling 92 directories and subdirectories).
Apparently it is necessary to add all these directories to the
OemPnPDriverPath (why can't windows setup just copy it all to hard
disk, and then seek the correct .inf file in that tree?). I ended up
with a totally-unconfigured system with no support for the usb
controller, video chip, ethernet,...
I also tried generating the OemPnPDriversPath by adding all these
subdirs in a string and putting that in unattend.txt (just so
Unattended would skip asking which driver folders to add). Didn't seem
like a very good idea, the path became pages long and
Unattended/Windows Setup mangles the entire directory structure
anyway. I would prefer not having to wory about the correct hardware
drivers and to just let Windows Setup figure out what drivers to
install.
Currently I'm having another test system on my desk which is between
its 15th and 16th reboot for installing updates, or so it seems :-)
I'd like to draw your attention to C't offline update: a small GPL
program written by the dutch computer magazine C't. It produces update
cdroms for chosen windows versions and languages of Windows; the
updates are installed with MS's update agent, it's got its own system
for automatic reboot and recall and support for service pack releases.
Maybe it's worth considering to integrate this in Unattended?
Some download links in the scripts are dead. This probably because my
scripts are outdated - I tried updating them but always got a "no
route to host" error to the sourceforge cvs. Pretty annoying. I'll go
on without pe windows messenger for now.
Then, on the Pundit (after I'd thrown some cruft out of the drivers
directory, and removed the OemPnPDriversPath from unattend.txt), about
half of the drivers got installed - just not the usb ones and the
network. For some reason I just couldn't get the thing to work
afterwards too. Weird. I'll try Xp instead of 2000 and let know how it
went.
Also: the system currently installing is a win2k. I have an
unattend.csv which worked nice for the pundit and the windows Xp key,
but for this system Unattended still asks me for a product key. Which
is weird since the product key is in the database. Or is the key not
"Windows 2000 Professional ProductKey"?
Another thing I'm a bit (...) concerned about is security. The default
settings are guest:guest, so everyone can read unattended.txt and the
admin passwords therein. Would it be possibly/easy to remaster the
boot disk with some real user and real password?
--
Frank Van Damme A: Because it destroys the flow of the conversation
Q: Why is it bad?
A: No, it's bad.
Q: Should I top post in replies to mails or on usenet?
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