[The Black Cloud]

JFX, thanks a lot for your hard work

[lama]

Fan-Tastic.... downloading downloading downloading...

[click-click]

I am just looking into installing Win7 and I currently use WinNTSetup for doing XP Installs. I tried WinNTSetup V2 to do a Win7 install and it works great.

With XP, I was able to use a cmdlines.txt in \$WIN_NT$.~LS\$OEM$\ to add a RunOnceEx.cmd etc. to do my customizing. The structure for this is created using V1 of WintNTSetup, but With V2, I no longer see a structure to do this. Even though V2 allows regtweaks, I cannot determine how these tweaks are run. I was hoping to find a way to adapt the XP way of doing things to Win7. Is it possible?

Thanks..

This post has been edited by click-click: 16 March 2011 - 09:25 AM

[JFX]

The setup of windows vista and later does not use a cmdlines.txt during installation.

So for windows 7 winntsetup loads the registry hives of the prepared windows installation and writes the tweaks directly.

I don't know if there is an alternative to cmdlines.txt in windows vista or later

[click-click]

JFX, on 16 March 2011 - 03:32 PM, said:

The setup of windows vista and later does not use a cmdlines.txt during installation.

So for windows 7 winntsetup loads the registry hives of the prepared windows installation and writes the tweaks directly.

I don't know if there is an alternative to cmdlines.txt in windows vista or later

Is there a readable version of the regtweaks and how they are applied by V2?

I'd like to get an idea how I could add application registry entries for preloaded software that I copy to Win7.
I have the .reg entries for each application and need to apply them to both HKLM and HKCU keys. I assume
all of the V2 regtweaks apply to the HKLM system and software hives only. Is that correct?

This post has been edited by click-click: 16 March 2011 - 05:15 PM

[JFX]

click-click, on 16 March 2011 - 04:59 PM, said:

Is there a readable version of the regtweaks and how they are applied by V2?

 tweaks.au3 (9.55K)
Number of downloads: 23

IF you want RunOnceEx method similar to http://unattended.ms...xp/view/web/31/ then try following:

After Winntsetup finished create a folder on the installtion drive called install
Add your software to that folder.
create a cmd file inside this folder, like the following and run it.

@echo off

Reg Load HKLM\OFFLINE_SOFTWARE %~d0\Windows\system32\config\software
SET KEY=HKLM\OFFLINE_SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx

REG ADD %KEY% /V TITLE /F /D "Installing Applications"

REG ADD %KEY%\005  /VE /F /D "Java Runtime 6"
REG ADD %KEY%\005 /V 1 /F /D "%systemdrive%\install\jre-6u24-windows-i586-s.exe /s /qb /norestart"

REG ADD %KEY%\010  /VE /F /D ".NetFX 4.0"
REG ADD %KEY%\010 /V 1 /F /D "%systemdrive%\install\dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe /norestart /passive"

REG ADD %KEY%\015  /VE /F /D "AutoIt v3"
REG ADD %KEY%\015 /V 1 /F /D "%systemdrive%\install\Autoit3\autoit-v3-setup.exe /s"
REG ADD %KEY%\015 /V 2 /F /D "%systemdrive%\install\Autoit3\SciTE4AutoIt3.exe /s"

reg unload HKLM\OFFLINE_SOFTWARE

This post has been edited by JFX: 20 March 2011 - 06:27 AM

[click-click]

Thank you very much JFX for posting the reg file and the sample RunOnceEx tip. I am currently doing something similar using a SetupComplete.cmd that I copy to \Windows\Setup\Scripts\. This gets run immediately after Windows Setup completes before the Logon screen appears. Now, all I need to do is to figure out how to convert my winnt.sif to something I can use for Win7 to make the install less interactive. Thanks again ...

[click-click]

I ran a test installing Win7 with SP1 integrated and applied the majority of tweaks supplied by V2.
The following tweaks did not seem to work for me:

Show Take Ownership to context menu -> do not see this on any of the context menus
Show Cmd.exe Icon on context menu -> only shows with shift Right-Click
Disable Language Bar -> Still appears on taskbar (did not see this tweak in tweaks.au3 file)
Disable System Restore -> Still enabled for drive C: (DisableSR entry not present in registry. Tried adding this entry and made no difference)

I did not apply the following tweaks:
Show all tray icons
XP-like taskbar icons
Disable Aero Transparency
Disable Automatic Restart on WU
Force XP Partition Mode for new partitions
Disable Pagefile

The rest looks good. One tweak in the tweaks.au3 (NoSecurityWarning4DownloadedFiles) is not selectable in the GUI for Win7

Thanks...

[JFX]

You use an old version, these 4 tweaks were changed with version 2.0.3.37.

the DisableSR doesn't not completely disable system restore, but at least it set the reserved space to 0%, what should have the same effect.

This post has been edited by JFX: 23 March 2011 - 12:21 PM

[os2fan2]

Is there any plan to add support for boot drives that are FAT16? I tried to install Win2k onto a NTFS, but my boot drive is a DOS disk, which is a fat16 partition?

The program looks quite good elsewise.

[JFX]

Hi Wendy

FAT16 will be selectable for boot drive in next version.

[lama]

OK, something is wrong... i've this modded W7 OS (Tiny7, which you can search at the usual place) and your app failed to install that OS (but OS installs fine from CD boot)

This post has been edited by lama: 26 March 2011 - 03:00 AM

[JFX]

lama, on 26 March 2011 - 02:59 AM, said:

OK, something is wrong... i've this modded W7 OS (Tiny7, which you can search at the usual place) and your app failed to install that OS (but OS installs fine from CD boot)

hmm, what could be wrong here?

However, I will not add support for any Warez release. Use a clean, preferable unmodded Windows version.

[click-click]

I am trying to use WinNTSetup V2 to setup Win7 on a VMware virtual disk. I had a bootable Win7 already installed on that vmdk which booted fine. When I mounted that vmdk and formatted it and then ran WinNTSetup and selected that drive as the boot drive + installation drive, all three boot flags were red. Bootsect threw an error after the WinNTSetup was finished with the install.wim and the setup would not boot in the VM. I am doing all this from an XP machine and don't have any problems when using a native disk.

I can prep XP on a VMware virtual disk and it boots fine, but not Win 7. If I select the left tab with the W7 vmdk as the target, I see a green NTLDR PBR If I use the right tab, the BOOTMGR PBR is red. Any ideas?

Thanks

This post has been edited by click-click: 28 March 2011 - 05:59 PM

[JFX]

I could reproduce your problem.

After formating the drive under Windows XP, the Partition will have a NTLDR loading PBR.
The MBR of the mounted disk is not visible to the Host OS. So MBR and Boot Flag will be red.

Main problem is that tools like bootsect or bootice can not change the PBR of a VMware mounted partition.
I'm not sure how i solve this in future versions, but you can try following:

After Winntsetup has finished make a copy of bootmgr in the selected bootdrive and rename it to NTLDR.

[click-click]

Okay, I formatted a newly created vmdk with a Win 7 VM and mounted that for WinNTSetup and now I see a green check mark for the BOOTMGR PBR. I will try your suggestion (formatted in XP) later. Did I understand you correctly that I should select "Do Not update the boot configuration" whenever using a mounted virtual disk?

This post has been edited by click-click: 29 March 2011 - 04:35 PM

[JFX]

Yes use "Do Not update the boot configuration", but this will only avoid the error message.

I have found a way to detect a mounted Vmware partition, so next version should not show this error.
And hopefully make it boot able somehow.

This post has been edited by JFX: 30 March 2011 - 03:24 AM

[click-click]

I ran WinNTSetup using the virtual disk that I formatted from a Win 7 VM. I still got a WinNTSetup bootsect error message even after selecting "Do Not update the boot Configuration". Now when I try to boot, I get Operating System not found. I'm still not there yet.

[JFX]

I'm sorry, but i can not add support for vmware mounted disk.

Even after updating the PBR and create a correct BCD store, bootmgr will at least try to boot the OS, but fail in a black screen.
There is a good reason why the checkbox for read-only mounting is always set, the driver corrupts data.

VMware is very immune against bug reports, so i don't think this will be fixed anytime.

There maybe is a solution, the vmlite guy's have written their own driver which can mount vdi/vhd and vmdk images.
It's in the current version of VBoot

works very good so far:

vbootctl.exe mount "VMware.vmdk"
vbootctl.exe umount Z:

This post has been edited by JFX: 31 March 2011 - 05:29 AM

[JFX]

Update: Version 2.0.4.41

- automatic decompression of ntldr/setupldr/bootmgr on NTFS compressed drives
- drive selection will not accept read only drives for boot- and installation drive
- improved VHD creation and installation*
- added option for instant creation of fixed VHD's
- added support for FAT16 and exFat boot drives


*VHD creation now uses diskpart script like this

create vdisk file="C:\Windows7.vhd" maximum=25600 type=(fixed|expandable)
select vdisk file="C:\Windows7.vhd"
attach vdisk
create partition primary align=(32|64|128|256|512|1024|2048)
active
format quick fs=ntfs label="Win7 VHD" uint=(512|1024|2048|4096|8192|16K|32K|64K)
assign letter=X:

In rare cases without setting fs=ntfs, diskpart will format the partition with FAT32.
Partition now active and the installation to a VHD will now create boot files inside the Vdisk too. (So you can boot this VHD also in VirtualBox)

Further due to the long time required by creating big fixed VHD's, there a new option: instant creation of fixed VHD's

Also added Alignment and Allocation option to GUI.