Unattended Installs and SATA drivers.

[Codesmith]

Is there anyway to press F6 durring an unattended install to load SATA drivers?

Can I just add the SATA drivers to the unattended install CD?

I have never don't an unattended install with a drive connected to a controller that required drivers to be loaded, so this will be knew to me.

 

[blah]

Unattended Installs means Unattended Installs. Windows setup was not made/thought of SATA drives.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

 

[Codesmith]

After some searching I found that it is possible although the deatils on how to do it manually gave me a headache after.

Interesting reading if you need to reinstall XP on a specific motherboard over and over. But its not very high on my need to learn tech skills.

I also found a program called n-lite which attempts to automate the process of customizing an installation CD in every way possible.

I am decided to spend a half hour attempting to create a unattended XP CD with my own drivers added and unnecessary one's removed.

If it doesn't work then I will just go ahead and do things the easy way.

 

[blah]

Why do you need to do it, is it something you'd like to play with for fun, or you have 100s of PCs to work on? Just curious.

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...

 

[jihiggs]

most sata controlers are treated like scsi controlers. and those were considered durring windows install.

this is my boomstick!

 

[khha4113]

As I read it somewhere a while back (maybe in NForcershq forum), in order to install SATA controller during Windows installation (that you don't have to press F6), you need to modify the file called <b><font color=red>Txtsetup.sif</b></font color=red> in Windows XP CD (it contains all drivers that Windows Setup going to load when it initializes) by adding an entry for your SATA controller.
<b><A HREF="http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8892&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0" target="_new"><font color=green>Making XP CD with all drivers</A></b></font color=green>



Good or Bad have no meaning at all, depends on what your point of view is.

 

[Codesmith]

Just for fun I guess.

I have a degree in computer science and people just sort of expect me to know how to do these things (even though you don't and shouldn't learn anything about PCs in a decent CIS program).

Anyway I hate wasting time. Sitting in front of a PC screen answering stupid questions the installed could have asked all at one is a wast of time. A half hour of my life gone for ever and nothing to show for it.

So instead whenever I need to install XP or anyone I know needs to install XP I just spend 1 minute customizing the answer file and burn a CD.

Of course once I install XP on a particular machine I imediately create a ghost image so I never have to do it again.

So far I spent about a hour researching how to install integrate custom storage/RAID drivers into XP. Easiest method is to use n-lite which reads the driver files and modifies txtsetup.sif amoung other things. It can also remove unneeded drivers so they don't load shaving minutes off the install time.

Assuming what I learned works it will be well worth the hour investment.

If I don't need to do it now with this motherboards SATA controller, I will eventually need to do it with a RAID card or something