CustomSettings.ini

Sysprep.inf is dead! Long live sysprep.inf.

Here's the good stuff on the CustomSettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini if you don't care to read my story on them... CustomSettings.ini lives in the Control folder in your deployment point. If you can't find it in the root then it is in a sub folder. If there are more than one you will need to find out which one actually controls your booting up. I guess it is also worth pointing out that these files get copied to the boot CD if you make one so you have to "recompile" your boot disc everytime you make a change to either of those files. Skip to the bottom for more info without my life's story as it relates to CustomSettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini.

I had *ahem* a very hard time trying to figure that was was driving this Win PE thing that I was being told to use by BDD. I knew that somewhere somehow something was telling PE to do something, but at the time I was trying to figure that out it seemed like finding out what was on the state secrets list. After digging for a long time I finally figured out that the files that I really needed to mess with were Customsettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini.

When I first started my life as a tech working on our lab machines we were using DOS boot disks (and this wasn't THAT long ago -- I'm not THAT old :p ) to start our builds for our XP machines. Eventually we ran into BartPE and life was glorious! The group that I am now a part of syspreped their builds that they made and I started to become very familiar with what that little file did. I worked with that file and got things to smooth out a fair amount. So when I read that sysprep.inf was dead I just couldn't believe that there was not something waiting in the wings to drive the new install system MS had built.

I knew that there were a lot of options in sysprep.inf that would save me a lot of typing and waiting around on dialog boxes. When I first started looking and trying to figure out what was driving this new menu system of course I knew that it was all XML. I tried to wade my way through them, but the only thing that I could really come up with was "yeah the things display things, but somewhere something has to initialize that variable." I am not a programmer and so looking at the scripts folder in my deployment point I was very daunted by the task of trying to follow all those scripts to figure out what was going on. Litterally after looking for 2 weeks, buying 2 books, doing tons of googling, and complaining to anyone that would listen I stumbled across CustomSettings.ini in forum posting I believe. White papers be damned I found what I could actually edit to get that XML that you talked about so much to do things for me!

Eureka!


The base CustomSettings.ini and Bootstrap.ini are very sparse files.

CustomSettings.ini:
[Settings]
Priority=Default
Properties=MyCustomProperty

[Default]
OSInstall=Y


Bootstrap.ini:
[Settings]
Priority=Default

[Default]
DeployRoot=

In the first BDD that I installed you could get to these files, but there was no indication that they would really help you in any way. All the white papers talked about was the other thing that I can't even seem to find in Deployment now. I wasted a lot of time on that thing trying to get it to customize my setup and not understanding what CustomSettings.ini did. Well now that you've listened to my life's story here's a good listing of the things that you can put into CustomSettings.ini to get the things done that you need to get done:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490304.aspx