krick wrote:I'm grateful that someone has done the work to make driverpacks possible. I really don't know what I said in my original post to provoke all the vitriol, but I'd like to put that behind us and make this a useful thread going forward.
That's perfectly fine by me!
It's really not a personal issue when we sound a bit grumpy because some members appear not to hold to certain standards of respect and manners, so do not assume we all hate you now or anything 
I know you guys think I'm a "noob", but I'm a 38 year old professional software developer and I've been building my own computers since the days of the 286. I've been making my own slipstreamed CDs since windows 2000, I've done countless repairs, backups, re-installs, upgrades, in-place re-installs, motherboard swaps without a re-install, and every other situation you can imagine. However, I've only recently started using driverpacks.
That's fine.
The only reason we could ever think "noobish" of you would have been your posts here (and we do not judge by post-count!).
As you said yourself, you were new to the DriverPacks, so, by definition, you'd be a "noob" in that regard 
While we do not cater for total unattended noobs (and constanly point them to the outstanding guides as MSFN), we do not have a problem with DP noobs - in fact, that's what the tuts are for (albeit most BASE options are self-explanatory).
The only thing we request if you are new to the DriverPacks, is that you do as told.
Most folks have issues that are self-made because they do not stick to the guides, do things their way rather than ours (fine by me, just don't complain) or simply assume things they got no clue of.
Only yesterday, one user claimed we'd install the DriverPacks to C:\Windows even on a 2k system when that uses C:\WINNT by default.
Of course we are smart enough to use %systemroot% to cover all eventualities, so assuming this means he thinks we are noob, and of course that is going to provoke not the friendliest answer.
I understand that driverpacks are intended for an unattended install, and that was how I had been using them in the past.
The problem was that I didn't know that driverpacks changes the functionality of an operating system install disc.
It's not down to the DriverPacks (or not only, because other apps for unattended preparation do it, too, e.g. nLite) but a "feature", MS introduced.
If your winnt.SIF file contains these
UnattendedInstall=Yes
OemPreinstall=Yes
entries, you will no longer be able to press F6 for the MS floppy, you will no longer be able to do a repair install and you will no longer be able to upgrade.
As you can edit the winnt.SIF all by yourself using your most favourite text editor, the DriverPacks only make use of a feature that is already present and would also kick in if no DriverPacks or any other unattended tool was used.
I would consider this well-known among unattended users, but maybe it never occured to you.
I never even considered the possibility that an XP CD with driverpacks wouldn't behave like a normal OS CD when using it to upgrade windows 2000.
A "normal" (as supplied by MS) CD does not contain the unattended entries, that's why.
I know which files are part of a clean OS install. However, as this was an upgrade, there were a bunch of other files in the root from other badly behaving apps that I had installed over the life of my system.
Hm, ususally, there should be no extra files in the root (unless they are temporary).
That would seem your system was already pretty messy, in which case messing it up even further by the in-line upgrade certainly doesn't help system stability and performance...
Anyway, as I said, system files are marked as such (you can chose not to have these shown in folder options) and hidden.
That should be enough properties to filter them from the rest of the garbage that may be on root.
When I did the upgrade and saw all the loose files in the root of the hard drive, I just assumed that something went very wrong, when in fact, that's completely normal given the way that the driverpacks system works. I've seen other product installations fail and put all the files in the root of the hard drive, so though I was wrong, I don't think it was out of line for me to make that assumption.
If you have never attended an installation with DriverPacks, you wouldn't know, right.
Also, something did go wrong in your case, Finisher did not run.
However, that's nothing too serious, as, you know that by now, you can run it manually.
Also, since I had never needed to run the finisher manually in the past, it was in no way obvious that that was the resolution to my problem and I don't see why it would have been obvious to anyone else in my situation.
Curiousity helps!
I had almost the same problem once, but running the file that is named the same as the process that runs during cleanup brought the desired result.
Seemed logical to me at that time...
The other end are people who use an unattended CD that someone else created for them and don't understand anything about how it works.
Yeah, those should ask the persons they got it from rather than post here, IMO.
Ususlly, they are also trying to work with their already modded (sometimes DL off the net as warez) ISOs which is really begging for trouble (plus we do not support warez obviously).
Then, they blame us for their problems when in fact it's them not reading the guides, knowing what they are doing or even using a legit, original CD as source...
But I'm going off-topic.
Like I said before, if it's possible, using a temporary folder to hold all the files before the driverpacks finisher is called would have made the situation much clearer to me.
Well, I suppose the files could be put into the \D folder, however, I don't know how that would work with deleting, ans the Finisher needs to be deleted through the reboot and can obviously not delete the directory it resides in.
Of course, putting anything in root is a bad idea generally, however, if things work as they should, the users wouldn't even notice.
That combined with a "run DP Finisher to complete install" textfile would make it crystal clear. At least I would have known that the install didn't complete and what the next step was.
Well, you could have simply come here and run a search on that ("files left on root" or something) or post about it asking what to do with the left files - oh wait, you did that and we told you to simply run the Finisher.exe 
and never thanked me for and then wondered why i was miffed at you... DUH...