Hey all,

I'm making a bunch of Boot Screens for my unattended installation, and will, in the near future, make some sort of routine for changing between these (does this exist, by the way?)

Now, I have followed the instructions under the unattended CD/DVD guide, but it still isn't working. I get the menu choices when I boot, but even though the files are copied I still get "the good ol'" windows logo. So...I'd appreciate any help I can get!

To start off; if I name the boot files ntoskrnl.exe and place them in the system32 dir they seem to work fine. If I, like the guide says, place them under $OEM\$$ they do not. I've also tried placing them under $OEM\$$\system32, but that doesn't work either. Do they need to have a strict 8.3 filename? Is the placement \windows or \windows\system32? ntoskrnl.exe resides in \windows\system32...

Cheers!

So when windows is already installed and you manually put them into windows\system32 they work? But when they are in OEM\$$ for the installation they do not and you end up with the original windows boot screen?

I have had that problem. ntoskrnl.exe seems to do more than just take care of the booting when windows is being installed. I have had windows install fine until the last reboot and it goes wrong. However, this only happens when I change the colour pallet. If I leave the colour pallet alone and just change the bitmap it works fine.

You may also have to run in a command window: modifype.exe ntoskrnl.exe -c
to make the installation believe that it's the original microsoft file.

My solution to the problem is this: I have an ntoskrnl.exe in I386 which has been modified. The colour pallet is the same old 16 horible colours but I use a bitmap that says "Building Windows". That way it looks like something is happening. Then once windows is installed I use deskcln.cmd to move a nice boot screen (with changed pallet) from an OEM folder into system32. After a reboot it looks great! No more horrible windows flag!

I don't know if that solution appeals to you because it seems like you want nice boot screens while you are installing. If you ever get a boot screen with a changed pallet to be accepted by the windows installation let me know how!

Seems I found a good solution!

I've now two boot logos - one called "under construction" (I blatantly stole the graphics p) and one called "blank". I've put the construction logo with my source, so it's installed with windows and gives me a nice "this stuff is being set up" atmosphere throughout the whole setup. Then, during GuiRunOnce, I remove this line from boot.ini (and then I no longer care about wfp) and set up my blank (from $OEM\$$\system32) as the default and use bootskin to skin it from then on. The reason why I even cared to make a blank boot logo is that bootskin has a small delay where you can see the old logo - which I do not want.

If anyone's interested I can go into more detail...

Cheers!