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Microsoft Windows NT4 SP6 - Unattended Setup

I thought there is nothing special to install the Windows NT4 SP6 (SP6a) as unattended one. My goal was very simple: 1) install it quietly; 2) reboot the system.

The unattended setup itself consists of two steps: unpack the files; run the update. The only info I've found about extracting files was a /x parameter to be used along with sp6i386.exe (this is the SP6a). That will prompt you about a destination folder. The next line will extract files quietly to the destfolder directory.

   sp6i386.exe /x:destfolder /q

We need one more thing to take care of: in such a notation the SP will create detached process aside from calling batch script. To make it wait for the SP to finish extracting files I use start /wait command.

Finally, here is a resulting batch file I used to install the SP6 for NT4. The syntax for update.exe can be easily found at Microsoft site. In this script it will show progress bar (GUI) but won't ask for any user input. It won't initiate the reboot either. It's done later by means of reboot.exe utility.

   @echo off
   echo INSTALLING SP6a MAIN MODULE
   echo Extracting files...
   start /wait sp6i386.exe /x:temp /q
   pushd temp
   cd update
   echo Starting the update...
   update.exe -u -f -n -o -z
   popd
   echo Deleting temp data...
   rd /s/q temp
   echo Rebooting...
   reboot -reboot

The reboot unility can be used any of known. See my freeware section for one of them.

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