Installing WinXP: Actually, it doesn't have to be so hard.

The operating system has evolved into the XP era, but when installing the operating system, there are still many people who have no choice but to spend more than an hour answering a few simple questions. In fact, XP has some tools to help you get rid of the boring wait during the installation process, but you may not have noticed them yet.

Win XP has a wizard-based installation manager that helps us create a text file to answer all the questions in the installation process. Another important deployment tool is Sysprep, but it is mainly targeted at a large number of repeated installations of the same operating system, with tools such as Ghost to copy disk images. As its name suggests, Sysprep is a "system preparation tool" that removes all unique information about the current operating system before creating a disk image. As long as you pre-process with Sysprep before creating the disk image, after copying the disk image to the target machine, you no longer need to use the tools like Ghost Walker to re-delete and configure some unique configuration information, especially SID duplication problem with security risks.

Both the Installation Manager and Sysprep can be found on the Win XP CD, which is in the DEPLOY.CAB file in \\Support\\Tools. Extract the entire DEPLOY.CAB file directly to a directory on your hard drive, without having to install it.

First, the installation manager

Since the purpose of the installation manager is to help us achieve automatic installation of Win XP, it does not have to be on Win XP itself. Can run (Win XP can of course). After unpacking the DEPLOY.CAB file, double-click Setupmgr.exe to start the installation management wizard. A welcome screen appears. Click “Next” to create a fully automatic unattended installation configuration file. The next steps are six.

1 Select “Create a new answer file”, as shown in Figure 1, click “Next”. FIG

a

② select "the Windows installation involved no", Figure 2, click on "Next." FIG

two

③ to the actual situation according to the operating system to be installed, for example, Win XP Pro, FIG tris (Thus, the installation manager for a variety of Win XP CD Operating system), then click "Next".

④ setting "interaction level" dialog box, shown in Figure Four, select "all automatically" and click "Next." FIG

four

⑤ select installed from a CD, five as shown in FIG. Another option, "Distribution Folder", is to publish Win XP installation files through a shared folder, such as via a network (not a local CD). Click "Next" to confirm acceptance of the license agreement. FIG

five

⑥ to enter the setting interface shown in FIG six, where the setting information Windows installation process to use. Each time you answer a group of questions, click the “Next” button once, and after entering all the information, “Next” will become “Complete”. According to my experience, the points to be aware of are: First, you must manually select the GMT+8 (Beijing) time zone when selecting the time zone. It will not automatically select this option as in the official installation process. Second, carefully check the product key. The installation manager does not verify that the key is correct. If you make a wrong key, unattended installation will not work smoothly.

Figure VI

Click on the "Finish" button, the wizard will prompt the location to save the configuration file. There are two files generated by the wizard. The first one is the installation configuration file unattend.txt, which is used to provide the information needed for the installation process. The second one is unattend.bat, which is used to start the installation process. Double-click unattend.bat to start the unattended installation process. Note that you can put the Win XP CD before clicking unattend.bat.

The following is an example of unattend.bat (omit comments and a few lines of insignificant commands):
set AnswerFile=.\\unattend.txt
set SetupFiles=F:\\ I386

F:\\i386\\winnt32 /s:%SetupFiles% /unattend:%AnswerFile%
You can see if you want to move unattend.bat and unattend.txt on another machine without executing The person is on duty to install, and may need to be modified. First, if unattend.txt and unattend.bat are not in the same directory, you must modify the AnswerFile environment variable to point to the correct path. Second, if the CD-ROM is not F: You must change the "F:" in the two "F:\\i386" to the correct drive letter.

In the above process of running the wizard, we have always chosen the simplest and most automated installation method, which is actually the most typical unattended installation. In addition, the installation manager can help us to configure a variety of special installation methods, such as Sysprep to perform disk image installation, remote installation services, and precise adjustment of the automation process of the installation process, etc. Detailed research and excavation.

Second, the disk image

In recent years, disk imaging tools such as Ghost has gradually become a must-have tool for many people, the reason is probably because The operating system is getting bigger and bigger. Some individual users also like to use disk imaging, but it is not difficult to imagine that enterprises, computer manufacturers, and vendors are the most enthusiastic advocates for installing machines through disk imaging. So let's just take a look at XP's Sysprep. .

As far as the speed of installing the operating system is concerned, the disk imaging method is unique, but it also has some shortcomings that cannot be ignored. First, because the disk image is a direct copy of the source machine's disk contents, the target machine typically has exactly the same hardware device as the source machine.

Second, some configuration information should be different from each other. For example, the machine name and TCP/IP configuration must be modified after the image is deployed. For Win 95/98, it's not a big deal; but Win 2K/XP faces an important problem: if you deploy the same disk image to multiple machines, their security identifiers (SIDs) are the same as the source machine. . The SID is used to identify the unique identity of a machine on the network. Each machine must be different, but modifying the SID is not as simple as modifying the machine name and TCP/IP configuration. You must use a tool such as Ghost Walker or use Win XP. The system preparation tool Sysprep is provided to pre-process the source machine before making a disk image.

The time to run Sysprep is to extract the two files obtained from DEPLOY.CAB, namely Sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe, after installing the source machine and making the disk image. Copy these two files to the Sysprep directory of the source machine C: drive and double-click Sysprep to start running. Sysprep will clear all necessary configuration information in the system, including the machine name, serial number, SID, and so on. Once the source machine is processed by Sysprep, the disk image can be made in the usual way.

The disk image is deployed on the target machine in the same way as the regular deployment, but the first time you start, the system runs a "Minimum Installation Wizard" that provides input of various unique configuration information. Opportunity.

Using Sysprep has the added advantage of being able to detect subtle differences between the source and target machines on hardware devices, such as different network cards and graphics cards. For more instructions on using Sysprep, please see the help file in DEPLOY.CAB.