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Windows NT 4.0 Unattended from CD?
With Windows 2000/XP, if I want to run an unattended installation directly from CD/ISO, all I need is to add the WINNT.SIF to the i386 folder. If I do this with Windows NT 4.0, it just crashes with BSOD 0x1E "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED", Address blah blah blah setupdd.sys, after the text mode welcome screen, right before trying to setup the partition.
The only workaround I found so far is adding a Windows 95 boot floppy as a boot sector (like in Windows 98/Me CDs) which in turn sets up a FAT16 partition with GDisk, then after a reboot, copies the answer file to C: and runs WINNT.EXE /B /U:C:\UNATTEND.TXT /S:%CDROM%\i386. I would prefer to use the text mode setup to prepare the partition since it's cleaner and just better than using a clumsy batch file and external commands. Can this not be done, or am I messing something up?
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NT 4.0's setup process is less flexible and more sensitive to disk configuration and unattended answer files. When you try to run WINNT.EXE with an answer file (WINNT.SIF) directly from the CD, it sometimes crashes due to incompatibilities or limitations in the setup environment, especially if the partitioning isn't prepared exactly as setup expects.
