Advanced Unattended Installs

Last December, I bought a Compaq Presario 4860 that didn't want me to install Windows NT. The Presario shipped with the OSR2.1 version of Wintendo (oops, I mean Windows 95), and its hard disk came preformatted as FAT32--as if I'd buy a 333MHz computer with 128MB of RAM and run only Win95 on it.

When I tried to repartition the disk as a 2GB FAT disk, Win95 insisted on repartitioning the entire disk to FAT32 and reinstalling the operating system (OS). I called Compaq technical support. The representative I spoke with told me that the Presario doesn't have a hidden switch to let me reinstall Win95 without repartitioning the disk, and that Compaq wouldn't support the computer if I installed NT on it.

Thank goodness for PowerQuest's PartitionMagic (which you can download from http://www.powerquest.com). PartitionMagic let me resize the 8GB FAT32 disk to 2GB, then converted the disk from FAT32 to FAT without damaging one byte of data. If you don't have PartitionMagic, get it.

After repartitioning the hard disk to FAT, I was ready to install NT on the system. When I performed an attended setup on the Presario, NT installed and ran like a champ. However, when I tried to perform an unattended NT installation on the machine, I ran into trouble.

Unattended Installation Basics

NT Setup is good at detecting hardware, but it can't detect hardware it doesn't look for.

I keep a copy of the i386 directory on the hard disks of the machines I have NT licenses for, and I use winnt /b or winnt32 /b to install and reinstall NT. For unattended installations, I use (and recommend highly) two tools. The first tool is GHOST, a program that copies a disk partition or logical drive to another drive or a network server. You can purchase GHOST or download a trial version at http://www.ghostsoft.com.

The other tool is an unattended installation script, an ASCII file I created to answer all the questions that NT asks during setup. Writing a basic setup script is simple with the help of NT Setup Manager, which you can find in the \support\opk\n subdirectory of the NT Server CD-ROM, in which n stands for the NT platform you're using. Setup Manager creates an ASCII setup script that you can alter if you need to. (For details about writing setup scripts for unattended installations, see Christa Anderson, "Designing Unattended NT Installations," March 1997.) Then, you provide the NT setup program (winnt.exe or winnt32.exe) with the setup script's name and i386's location. For example, if you save the ASCII file as C:\unattend.txt and i386 is at C:\i386, type

winnt /b /s:c:\i386 /u:c:\unattend.txt

from DOS or the Win95 safe mode command prompt, or

winnt32 /b /s:c:\i386 /u:c:\unattend.txt

from NT to start the installation process. Add the line

OEMSkipEULA = Yes

to the setup script's [Unattended] section, and you have everything you need to perform an unattended installation. Usually.

Smooth Installations on New Machines
The problem I ran into with the Presario is the same problem I've faced with many new computers: NT 4.0 shipped during summer 1996, but many new machines have video cards, network cards, and SCSI cards that didn't exist in 1996. NT Setup is good at detecting hardware, but it can't detect hardware it doesn't look for. The Presario has a 3Com 3C900 EtherLink PCI card. The 3C900 NIC runs fine under NT, but its drivers aren't on the original NT Server 4.0 CD-ROM.

I used NT Setup's OEM Preinstall feature to automate NT's detection of the 3C900 NIC. To add a NIC to the list of hardware NT automatically detects, you need a functioning copy of NT on the computer housing the NIC, the NIC's installation files (the drivers disk), and an ASCII setup script that's complete except for instructions for setting up the NIC.

You need to install the drivers manually on the first computer you install the NIC on so you can gather the information you need to perform subsequent unattended installations. Then, you need to perform a series of steps.