Customizing Unattended Win2K Installations

The bane of every systems administrator's existence is visiting user desktops. The reason isn't that users are terrible people unworthy of visitation, but that desktop visits are time-consuming and costly for the company. In many organizations, the installation and configuration of client OSs is often one of the most significant drains on IT department resources.

Windows 2000 includes several deployment features that can help you manage the chaos inherent in installing and configuring client OSs on your network workstations. Although Windows NT offers useful utilities to assist you in automating OS installation and customization, Win2K greatly improves on these offerings. Win2K includes improved versions of NT favorites such as bootable setup CD-ROMs, over-the-network installations, unattended installations, answer files, Setup Manager, Sysdiff, and Sysprep. In addition, Microsoft includes the Win2K-upgraded version of Sysprep (i.e., Sysprep 1.1) in the Support Tools on the Win2K CD-ROM and in the Win2K Server and Win2K Professional resource kits.

Of all the available Win2K deployment methods, unattended installations remain a favorite of many administrators. As with NT, Win2K offers the ability to launch unattended installations through a /U command-line switch, which the user passes to the winnt.exe or winnt32.exe setup program. Win2K unattended installations are similar to NT-based unattended installations, and you can use Win2K's unattended-installation functionality to deploy new Win2K installations and upgrade from NT and Windows 9x. Win2K also includes several enhanced features that make Win2K-based unattended installations more powerful and convenient than their NT predecessors. You can use these features to fully customize your unattended installations to make them more useful and save more of your precious time.

Preparing a Distribution Folder
Win2K unattended installations require a set of installation source folders (aka distribution folders or distribution share points). These folders contain the files necessary to install Win2K. When you're performing a basic CD-ROM-based installation, the installation source folder is the CD-ROM's \i386 folder and its subfolders. Because they're on a CD-ROM, you can't change or customize the files within these folders.

However, hard-disk and network-based installations let you augment the installation folders in useful ways (e.g., add custom drivers or include the latest Win2K service pack). This ability allows for greater flexibility with and enhancement of installations that use these folders. The following steps walk you through how to create a basic Win2K distribution folder (e.g., on a network server):

1. Create a directory on a network server and share it using a name you choose (e.g., \\FILESERVER\WIN@KSRC).
2. Under the root of the new share, create a directory, which will be the equivalent of the Win2K CD-ROM's \i386 folder. If you think you'll have multiple installation folders in the future, you might want the name of the directory to refer to the product it installs (e.g., \Pro, \Srv, \AdvSrv). For one installation folder instance, I recommend that you name this directory \i386 to keep things simple.
3. Copy the contents of the CD-ROM's \i386 folder and all subfolders to the directory that you created in Step 2. (This installation will require a little more than 300MB of disk space.)
4. If you plan to customize this installation folder later by copying additional files, create a subfolder under the folder you created in Step 2 and name it $OEM$. Microsoft chose and reserved this name, and you must use it for this folder. The automated Win2K distribution methods can use files in this folder to customize a Win2K installation.

After you create a basic set of installation source folders, you can start customizing them. The $OEM$ subfolder isn't necessarily the only subfolder you'll need; it's actually a root folder that houses all the folders and files related to an automated or customized installation. Table 1 lists the $OEM$ subfolders and their contents.

All the files in distribution folders should use 8.3-format short filenames so they're accessible to Win2K Setup. If you want to rename files in these folders later, you can do so by creating a special file called $$RENAME.TXT in each folder that contains files that need to be renamed. (Multiple copies of $$RENAME .TXT might be in the distribution folder structure.) $$RENAME.TXT uses the following format:

[section_name_x]
shortname_y = "longname_y"

where section_name_x is the path to the subfolder that contains the files to be renamed. You don't need to name a section, or a section can have a backslash (\) as a name, which denotes that the section contains the names of the files or subfolders that are in the drive root. Short_name_y is the name of the file or subfolder in the subfolder that section_
name_x designates as the one that you want to rename. The name mustn't be enclosed in quotation marks. Long_ name_y is the new name of the file or subfolder. This name must be enclosed in quotation marks if it contains spaces or commas.

Updating Distribution Folders to Include Service Packs
A long overdue feature that Microsoft introduced in Win2K is the ability to update a hard-disk-based installation/distribution folder with a Win2K service pack. This process (aka slipstreaming a service pack or an integrated installation of a service pack) obviates the need for running a second, separate installation of a service pack after the base OS installation is complete. This integrated installation feature has two benefits: It lets you install new Win2K systems with the latest version of the OS, and it makes adding new OS components to existing installations a one-step process because it eliminates the need to reinstall the service pack after you add components. However, be aware that you can't uninstall SP1 if you installed the service pack from an SP1-slipstreamed installation source. Therefore, be sure that all your applications work properly with SP1 before you deploy.

To perform an integrated installation of a Win2K service pack on a distribution folder, run the service pack's update.exe program, which is in the \update subdirectory of the service pack source folder. However, if you're using the single-file compressed service pack version that you downloaded from Microsoft's Web site, you must first extract the files to an installation point by launching the executable and running it with the —x option (e.g., sp1network.exe —x).