NOTE: Unattended setup is geared at OEMs and corporate customers, and not really at consumers, so you may not be able to download tools and documentation from http://connect.microsoft.com. But read on … this is a really cool Windows Vista feature!
My name is Bilal Aslam and I’m Shell’s Deployment Program Manager. I like thinking about how to make deployment and setup easier and faster! Like many other folks on the Shell team, I have been using Windows Vista on all my three PCs for months and I am loving it. In the beginning, setting up an OS on three machines a day was taking too much of my time – I would launch setup, click through some initial prompts, wait for the main phases of setup to complete, and then click through some more pages of Windows Welcome. I would then log in, join a domain, add my domain account to the local Administrators security group, reboot and then install applications. PHEW!! This process took up to 30 minutes of my time every day for each PC.
Then, I discovered unattended setup. Unattended setup is a very powerful way to script setup so that it is zero-touch end-to-end! In the days of Windows XP, we released a set of documentation and tools called the OPK (OEM Preinstallation Kit) to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) covering unattended setup and other topics, so they could easily deploy Windows on thousands of PCs. With Windows Vista, we are now releasing a similar product called the Windows Administrative Installation Kit (WAIK) to corporate customers to make deployment easier and cheaper for them as well. I will be using technologies documented in the WAIK to show you how to get started with unattended setup.
Lets take a hands-on look at a simple unattend.xml file which automates some parts of Setup. If you want to test it out, insert your Windows Vista DVD, open an elevated command prompt, and launch “setup.exe /unattend:<path to unttend answer file>”, which will make setup use this unattend answer file for automation.
As you can probably guess, the following will happen:
- Setup will run in ‘en-US’ (English – United States), your keyboard will be US QWERTY, and Windows Vista’s UI language will be ‘en-US’. You will not be prompted for language or regional options in Setup.
- The display will be set to 1024 x 1280 x 32bpp. If your display adapter does not support this configuration, go ahead and change it to other values.
NOTE: This unattend file is authored for x86 machines only. To make it work on other architectures, change processorArchitecture to “amd64” or “ia64” as needed.
The key thing to note here is that unattended setup not only lets you provide values to suppress Setup prompts (1), but it also lets you automate tasks that are not generally performed in Setup (2). My unattended setup now fully automates all the tasks I used to do manually!
If you want to learn about creating unattend answer files, try this:
1. Download and install the Windows Administrative Installation Kit (WAIK) from Connect.
2. Download the ‘Deploying Vista Step by Step Guide’ guide from here.
3. Find the WIM file in your Windows Vista media’s sources folder. You will need this for the Windows System Image Manager (WSIM) unattend answer file authoring and validation tool included in the WAIK. I can’t warn users enough against using hand-crafted unattend answer files that have not been verified using WAIK tools. Setup can fail (as it should) if it detects invalid values in an unattend answer file.
In the next blog post on unattended setup, I will give an overview of tools in the WAIK.