CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.3. Performing Attended Installations of Windows

This section begins with an overview of the installation process for Windows 2000 and Windows XP and then Windows Vista. The attended installation processes for these two OSes are very similar, so if you know how to install one OS, you will be able to install the other with no problem.

I begin with attended installation of the OS. That is, installations that you attend, or sit through, and answer all the questions that the setup program asks.

The Windows attended installation is broken down into three major phases:

• Setup loader: The setup loader phase is initiated by calling winnt.exe or winnt32.exe or by booting from the Windows 2000/XP CD-ROM. This phase copies setupldr, which is a mini version of ntldr used by the setup program, and copies to the hard drive any files that the Windows setup utility needs.

• Text-mode phase: The text-mode portion of the Windows installation is typically identified by the text-based environment that has a blue background. You will recognize the text mode phase by the lack of a graphical interface. The text-mode portion of the install is controlled by a mini kernel that is started by usetup.exe, which is located in the i386 folder and called automatically.

  The text-mode phase of setup is responsible for detecting basic hardware components such as CPU, motherboard, and hard drives. This phase also creates the Registry, partitions and formats the drives, creates the file systems, and verifies that you ...