Unattended installation of Windows 8.1 – Skip Join Wireless network and Microsoft Account

I decided to give myself a little treat for xmas last year. After looking around I decided on an Intel NUC that can serve as a remote debugging machine for Visual Studio as well as a host for my MDT Deployment Share at home my lab.

In order to install this little piece of hardware I was faced with a challenge. I had no keyboard to use during installation. After looking around the apartment for a while it hit me, why not just create an unattended installation using MDT and a flash drive?

With Windows 8.1 there were some new stuff I had to fix in order to get the installation totally unattended, except the normal stuff that needs to be done in MDT (skipping all wizard pages using customsettings.ini for instance) the unattend.xml file needs to be updated.

Following the information at TechNet one can find that HideWirelessSetupInOOBE, HideOnlineAccountScreens and HideLocalAccountScreen must be defined.

After updating Unattend.xml it looks like this

<OOBE>
<HideEULAPage>true</HideEULAPage>
<NetworkLocation>Work</NetworkLocation>
<ProtectYourPC>1</ProtectYourPC>
<HideLocalAccountScreen>true</HideLocalAccountScreen>
<HideOnlineAccountScreens>true</HideOnlineAccountScreens>
<HideWirelessSetupInOOBE>true</HideWirelessSetupInOOBE>
</OOBE>

in the <settings pass=”oobeSystem”> section.

My CustomSettings.INI looks like this under [Default]

OSInstall=Y
SkipCapture=YES
SkipAdminPassword=YES
SkipProductKey=YES
TaskSequenceID=Win8
BDEInstallSuppress=YES
DeploymentType=NEWCOMPUTER
OSDComputerName=TV-PC
DoCapture=NO
SkipWizard=YES
SkipRoles=YES
SkipAdminAccounts=YES
SkipApplications=YES
SkipComputerBackup=YES
SkipDomainMembership=YES
SkipUserData=YES
SkipPackageDisplay=YES
SkipLocaleSelection=YES
SkipFinalSummary=YES
SkipBDDWelcome=YES
SkipComputerName=YES
SkipComputerBackup=YES
SkipTaskSequence=YES
SkipTimeZone=YES

and Bootstrap.INI contains the row SkipBDDWelcome=YES under the [Default] section.

/Tim

About The Author

Tim Nilimaa is a consultant with Lumagate in Sweden. He has been working with Configuration Manager for 8 years. His knowledge has been selected as a speaker at many events among them Microsoft Management Summit.

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