Answer file

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Thanks all for the very nice welcomes again

I got a question, I have a virtual PC question about IMG files for virtual PC as I need to make one for an answer file, and I have no clue how to make an image file for the floppy drive to recognise it.
This is all for unattended install on a virtual PC.
where do I put it in the forum section?

Thanks in advance.

-Mallet

 

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you use the option to control physical drive A. put the answer file on flop, bung it in, and use that option

 

I can only find the option physical drive for C: drive but not on the physical drive A option

As I keep trying to point the floppy image to the winnt.sif file and the later try the other one unattend.bat and get This message:

This file does not appear to be a floppy image.

Floppy image files must be of the correct size (either 720K or 1.4MB).


Is it true the theory about the answer files on the real world physical PC machines is you put the winnt.sif and unattend.bat on the floppy disk and it runs the windows install without user interaction?

-Mallet

 

Do you have a floppy drive on the host machine?

 

sorry if this is a newbie question, If you mean on my physical computer, no.

But I did install a clean XP virtual computer on one of the host com and did show a floppy disk icon in my computer but it wont read anything thats not in a vfd img,ima,dsk file.

Same thing goes with the cd/dvd drive, it only like ISO files, which i got it to work only because the file I found was a actual ISO file.

 

Yes, the host machine is the computer that has Virtual PC installed on it, the guest operating systems being those that run on the virtual computers created in Virtual PC.

If you don't have a floppy drive that a guest o/s can take control of you can create a Virtual Floppy disk using the Virtual disk wizard.

I've not done this before but i guess you would need to do the following:

1) Create a Virtual floppy disk from the virtual pc console.

2) Load up a virtual pc and capture the floppy drive.

3) Using the Virtual Machine add ons you can access a shared folder on the host operating system. Put your answer files etc into a shared folder on the host. Access the shared folder on the host through the virtual machine and then copy them to the virtual floppy disk.

4) Shut down this virtual pc.

5) Create a new virtual pc and capture the floppy disk from before.

When you run the unattended install it should pick up the files on the virtual floppy drive.

I find that the virtual machines without an o/s wont pick up a CD/DVD rom drive until there is an actual disk in the drive.

I use a virtual drive emulator that you can mount ISO images into. You can then point the virtual pc to use this drive as a CD/DVD drive and it will boot and install an o/s from an ISO image.

I can't recall where I got it from, but it's free and was linked off an MSDN disk at work. I'll try and find the link for it if you're interested? It may have come off the Microsoft site but i'm not sure.

Hope this helps,

Paul

 

Soo close, that method did reconise the floppy disk which is very good and I did put in the files for the unattended files into the virtual disk via the shared folder but now, when I boot the virtual computer on start-up attempt to clean install it now says:

non-sytem disk or disk error
replace and press any key when ready

Just correct me if Iam wrong, the files I got on the virtual floppy are: unattend.bat and winnt.sif

as winnt.sif is used for CD based install.

If you can, do would be very very helpfull.

-Mallet

 

Mallet,

Have you set the boot sequence in the virtual pc BIOS to boot from CD ROM first?

If you are installing onto a clean hard drive then you do not need the unattend.bat file but you must rename the unattend.txt to winnt.sif. You wont be able to run the unattend.bat file unless have MS-DOS installed but it shouldn't be a problem if it is on the floppy. If you are upgrading windows NT 4.0, 98 or 2000 then you can use the batch file or use winnt/winnt32 from the command prompt.

The only link I could find for the Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM console is on this page. The link is in the Method 1 section. Just click and it will prompt you to download.

 

Awesome I got it to work. Thanks stoney.
I was suppose to put the answer file just after when it reads the CD and it answered all the question. I made a bit of **** up with the cd key but it continued with the answer file later.

I have one question, in the real world whats the best was of deploying loads of clean install computer? I was thinking of RIS but I could be wrong.

Thanks agian guys for taking the time to answer my newbie questions.