Installation Notes for Performing Unattended Installations Using ADS

This Readme file is designed to help you perform an unattended installation of a Microsoft® Windows® operating system using Automated Deployment Services (ADS). It covers the following information:

● Overview

● Requirements

● Procedures

Overview

When performing server purposing in a data center, you can use ADS to perform unattended installations of Microsoft Windows operating systems to destination (target) devices. Using scripts and an answer file, the unattended installation procedure captures Windows installation and bootstrap files in an image file and deploys that image file to devices. The ADS Controller then initiates Windows Setup to run locally on the device. This process differs from the conventional ADS server purposing procedure, which calls for deploying a volume image to the target device with Windows already set up and configured.

Requirements

To perform an unattended installation of Windows using ADS, you must have the following available:

● ADS Controller

● 500 megabytes (MB) of available disk space on the Controller

● Windows installation files

● Valid Windows product key

● ADSunattend.zip file (available on the solution CD)

### Procedures

You perform three procedures to complete an unattended installation using ADS.

1. Prepare a Partition and Capture an Image of It

► To prepare a partition and capture an image of it

1. Create a 500-MB partition on your ADS Controller and assign it a drive letter (for example, F:).

2. Format the new drive. Do not give it a volume name.

3. If the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 installation files are not already installed on your Controller, copy the \i386 directory from your Windows Server 2003 CD to a local drive (for example, C:\W2k3\I386).

4. Copy the sample files for OS Unattened install to c:\ drive on your controller. It contains the following files:

● PrepImage.bat

● Unattend.txt

● W2k3unattend.xml

5. Open the Unattend.txt file and edit the Windows product key value using a valid product key.

6. Right-click PrepImage.bat and then click Edit to edit the Environment Variables section to match your configuration. Examples of Environment Variables settings include:

● targetdrive=f:

● path_to_answerfile=c:\unattend.txt

● w2k3source=c:\w2k3ee\i386

● adsagentsource=c:\ads

● ADSinstallpath=c:\Program Files\Microsoft ADS

● guirunoncecmd=guirunonce.bat

● imagename=w2k3_Unattended.img

7. At a command prompt, run PrepImage.bat to create the unattended installation image.

Running PrepImage.bat produces a number of actions. The batch file uses the Unattended.txt file to run Windows Setup and populate the partition (drive F:) with installation files. This process takes three to four minutes. You should see Windows Setup screen start on the controller (Windows installation is not actually occurring on the controller). After the partition is populated with files, the batch file captures an image of it.

8. In the ADS Management console tree, click Images, and confirm that W2k3_Unattended.img is present.

2. Prepare the Destination (Target) Device

► To prepare a destination device to receive the unattended installation image

1. Boot a destination (target) device into the Deployment Agent.

2. In the ADS Management console tree, select Job Templates, and verify that the W2k3unattend.xml job was added after running PrepImage.bat.

3. In the ADS Management console, create a variable for each device named Computername and give it a value.

3. Deploy the Image to the Device

► To deploy the image to the destination device

1. In the ADS Management console, run the W2k3unattend.xml job on the selected device or device set. The job, which includes running Windows Setup on the device, should take about 30 to 40 minutes to complete.

2. Customize W2k3unattenc.xml with additional post-operating system configuration tasks as needed.