Where in the unattended setup? Invoked at T-?

[ganeshmms]

Hello Benjamin, I am relatively new to unattended setup, in particular to WIHU.

I have done some experiments with WIHU, and it seems to be an

ideal utility to run after a full unattended setup, especially for

changing 'Registered Owner' name, creation of new accounts, and

continue installing favorite applications. Thanks very much for offering

the neat tool.

I have a couple of basic questions on invocation of wihu that I felt was

not addressed in the help page (http://www.kalytta.com/wihu.manual.php)

which I browsed some time ago.

Where the command line that invokes wihu.exe should be placed

in the unattended setup process for installing applications from CD?

I have guess on this. As the name suggests (post installation), I felt that

the command-line should be placed such that wihu.exe is invoked during

first logon directly from CD. An example script would be

$OEM$\CmdLines.txt

[COMMANDS]
wihu_start.cmd

$OEM$\start_wihu.cmd (pseudocode only)

cmdow @ /HID
@echo off

for %%I in (C D ... Z) do if exist %%I:\WIN51 set CDROM=%%I:

SET KEY=HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce

REG ADD %KEY% /V WIHU /D "%CDROM%\BasicApps\wihu.exe" /f

exit

where all application installation EXEs are placed in the folder tree with

%CDROM%\BasicApps folder as root.

I hope I am right? I felt calling wihu through CmdLine.txt is better since it runs as a

system service as opposed to 'logged on user service' in the case of '[GuiRunOnce]'

part of winnt.sif. [From ref.chm of xp tools deploy.cab]

Such an invocation clearly makes wihu run during first logon.

However I am begining to get doubts on my understanding after I read a post

[Wihu CreateProcess] that mentioned something about running wihu during T-12

minute stage of XP setup. I am not clear about it. Can wihu be invoked by

GUI setup process during T-12? Should not all applications be installed only

after first logon into some account?

Could someone throw some light please?

Thanks very much

Ganesh

[BenjaminKalytta]

If WIHU is called at T-12, there are some restrictions. "System" account is used for application install which means:

1. Every registry change goes to Default user profile

2. Some applications which requires administrator privileges don't work

This also means, you can infact create new user accounts during T-12, but you can't set a primary user i.e. you can't run your setup's under one of this newly created user accounts.

So I would recommend to start Wihu in [GuiRunOnce] section.

Edited December 7, 2005 by BenjaminKalytta

[ganeshmms]

Thanks very much for the clarification.

Ganesh