I am trying to perform an unattended installation of Windows Server 2003 with SP2 on a bare metal HP ProLiant DL380 G4 server, using WinPE 2.0 and customised scripts from the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit 1.9 win32

Text-mode setup completes successfully, but when the server restarts to enter the GUI stage of Setup, an error message of "A disk read error occurred" is displayed.

A have located the problem to the format section, a can run the installation by format to fat32 first and then convert to ntfs in unattend.txt but a realy want to format using ntfs first.
(Diskpart entrys)
rescan
select disk=0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
assign letter=c
format fs=NTFS quick

or i can format using script later during the installation
@%MsTools%\format c: /FS:NTFS /Q /y
copying a lot of files then..
c:\i386\winnt32 /s:c:\i386 /unattend:c:\unattend.txt /syspart:c

create a file called fixboot.reg

paste the following text into it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vds\Alignment]
@="Alignment Settings in Bytes"
"Between4_8GB"=dword:00000000
"Between8_32GB"=dword:00000000
"GreaterThan32GB"=dword:00000000
"LessThan4GB"=dword:00000000

now run this command before doing any diskpart steps:

reg import fixboot.reg




this resolves disk alignment issue with winpe 2.x etc