Windows Vista Unattended Installation Tips

Microsoft Windows Vista was released not 2 weeks ago and at work I've been busily working away at setting up the Unattended installation for our OEM computers. Seeing as we aren't a Microsoft Gold Member we aren't privy to the good documentation and explanations for the setup. It took a while but I've integrated drivers, software installs, business details and logos into the installation.

Here I'll explain a few tricks I've found..

Adding the business logo to the Systems Properties window:

In your Autounattend.xml make sure you have UseConfigurationSet set to true. This will cause the installation to copy the files in $OEM$ on your USB stick/CD/Floppy to the relative directories of the destination computer. I tend to place my business logo in the OOBE (out of the box environment) directory. As such my USB key looks something like:

\Autounattend.xml
\$OEM$\$$\system32\OOBE\oemlogo.bmp

The $ directory will copy all the other child branches into the C:\Windows (assuming your installing to C: drive). Now to tell the install the company details.

<OEMInformation>
<Logo>C:\Windows\System32\OOBE\oemlogo.bmp</Logo>
<Model>Vista Premium TV</Model>
</OEMInformation>

There's obviously more details you can add here, such as the company name, phone support number and system type. The OEMInformation section is a child of the Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup component. You can put this in a few passes but I generally go for specialize.

When running synchronized commands with cmd.exe

I was trying to get my silent software installs working for a while then discovered that a direct call doesn't cut it. You need to specify a parameter to the cmd.exe program. That nifty little parameter is /C, which carries out the command specified by string and then terminates.

So when end up with:

<RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action=\"add\">
<Path>cmd /C \\server\Software\Vista.bat</Path>
<Order>2</Order>
<Description>Installing applications</Description>
</RunSynchronousCommand>

Windows Vista OEM product keys

This one I scored from a nice guy on the MSFN forums. These are:

Business - 4D2XH-PRBMM-8Q22B-K8BM3-MRW4W
BusinessN - 76884-QXFY2-6Q2WX-2QTQ8-QXX44
HomeBasic - RCG7P-TX42D-HM8FM-TCFCW-3V4VD
HomeBasicN - HY2VV-XC6FF-MD6WV-FPYBQ-GFJBT
HomePremium - X9HTF-MKJQQ-XK376-TJ7T4-76PKF
Ultimate - VMCB9-FDRV6-6CDQM-RV23K-RP8F7

I'll add more later ..