question regarding unattended installation of winXP

hey

I've run through the deplyment wizard (that wizard on the winxp cd) and
created a windist folder answer file etc...

The unattended.bat contains this code (generated by the wizard):
\\PC3\windist\I386\winnt32 /s:%SetupFiles% /unattend:%AnswerFile%
/copysource:lang
(this is on PC3 machine also, will remove \\PC3\ later... )

So I added this line at the start of the file:
i386\format /FS:NTFS /Vrive-C
(this is on the PC3, so no need for \\PC3\ etc)

but before I burned this a cd I wanted to test my scripts, so I opened a
command promt and typed:
I386/format /?

but then I only get this message:
"'i386' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file."

Is the syntax for this file different from what is possible in the standard
command prompt?

Or is it so that I don't need to specify "i386\format /FS:NTFS /Vrive-C"
instead there are some dedicated options I must set in the answer file for
it?... What I want is that when I run this installation process, the
formating of the harddrive is automatically performed

any suggestion?

"Jeff" <it_consultant1@hotmail.com.NOSPAM> wrote in message
news:OAQOmohnIHA.4196@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> hey
>
> I've run through the deplyment wizard (that wizard on the winxp cd) and
> created a windist folder answer file etc...
>
> The unattended.bat contains this code (generated by the wizard):
> \\PC3\windist\I386\winnt32 /s:%SetupFiles% /unattend:%AnswerFile%
> /copysource:lang
> (this is on PC3 machine also, will remove \\PC3\ later... )
>
> So I added this line at the start of the file:
> i386\format /FS:NTFS /Vrive-C
> (this is on the PC3, so no need for \\PC3\ etc)
>
> but before I burned this a cd I wanted to test my scripts, so I opened a
> command promt and typed:
> I386/format /?
>
> but then I only get this message:
> "'i386' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
> operable program or batch file."
>
> Is the syntax for this file different from what is possible in the
> standard command prompt?
>
> Or is it so that I don't need to specify "i386\format /FS:NTFS /Vrive-C"
> instead there are some dedicated options I must set in the answer file for
> it?... What I want is that when I run this installation process, the
> formating of the harddrive is automatically performed
>
> any suggestion?

If you want a robust batch file then you must specify
both the drive letter and the folder for each executable.
The line
i386\format /FS:NTFS /Vrive-C
contains neither. You can probably omit the drive letter
if the i386 folder resides on the current drive but you
MUST qualify the folder! I suspect that the batch file
now looks for \windows\system32\i386\format.com -
who knows?