Unattended Setup Does Not Honor Win31Upgrade=no In Answer

ID: Q163615

The information in this article applies to:

SYMPTOMS

You want to run Unattended Setup on a computer that already has Windows 3.x installed. But because you do not want to upgrade Windows, you specify "Win31Upgrade=no" in your unattended answer file.

Even though you do this, there is a message during text mode setup saying:

Setup has found a previous version of Microsoft Windows on your hard disk in the directory shown below.

C:\WINDOWS

Setup recommends installing Microsoft Windows NT in the same directory.


CAUSE

When Setup finds Windows, it first checks if there is enough free space on the partition containing Windows before it asks for the upgrade. If there is insufficient space, Windows NT Setup displays the message above before honoring the setting in the unattended answer file.

The drive is too full to hold Windows NT, which requires approximately 122 MB (1 MB = 1,048,576 bytes) of free disk space.


WORKAROUND

Free up some disk space by moving files or directories to another drive.

-or-

Windows NT only searches for Windows 3.1 in directories listed in the PATH statement in C:\Autoexec.bat. In the Windows directory, it checks for the files Win.com, Win.ini, and System.ini.

There are several ways to hide Windows from Windows NT Setup:

  1. Rename C:\Autoexec.bat prior to setup and undo the rename after setup.


  2. Rename Win.com, Win.ini, or System.ini in the Windows directory prior to setup and rename them after setup.


  3. In C:\Autoexec.bat, edit the PATH statement to remove the Windows directory.


  4. Setup also does not offer the upgrade if it suspects Windows 95 in this directory. Setup looks for Shell32.dll, User32.dll, Kernel32.dll, and Gdi32.dll in the system subdirectory. If it finds those files it will not perform an upgrade.



STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

Additional query words: unattend 


Keywords          : kbbug4.00 NTSrvWkst 
Version           : WinNT:4.0
Platform          : winnt 
Issue type        : kbbug

Last Reviewed: February 6, 1999