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Generate autounattend.xml files for Windows 10/11
- _JamesA_ 2y agoI recently used this generator to deploy a fleet of Windows 11 Enterprise virtual machines in VMWare Workstation. Very nice.
- juujian 2y agoThe level of workarounds that windows requires never cease to amaze me.
- dylan604 2y agoit's not just windows. every OS has "secret" options that a power user can use if only they knew about them.
- russellbeattie 2y agoDefinitely. I have a script I run on new Macs to turn on/off various features, mostly using "defaults write".
- 47282847 2y agoMind sharing it?
- EvanAnderson 2y agoWorkarounds to what? Windows, just like any other operating system, has its set of contrivances for different functions (in this case automated installation). Having used RedHat Kickstart I don't see it as hugely different.
- Lammy 2y agoI assume this is being posted/upvoted in terms of “workaround for Microsoft Account requirement”. I actually mostly like Windows, but that particular thing they're pushing is more infuriating than any other, and there have been lots of others. See the page's description for “Allow Windows 11 to be installed without internet connection”: > This effectively runs the oobe\BypassNRO.cmd command, which was discovered by Reddit user AveYo. You still have to click the I don't have internet button during Windows Setup. > Only check this option if your computer really does not have internet access. If you just want to create local (“offline”) user accounts in Windows 11, you can always do so in the _User accounts_ section of this form.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoThanks for that. I didn't even think about the whole Microsoft Account requirement in the context of unattended installs. I like Windows quite a bit. I get unreasonably angry when the ability to see the source code would be useful, or when I can't minimize irritations by recompiling. I feel that way about all closed-source software, though. By and large I'm happy to use it for some things. I've used it a long time. I don't dislike it. What's happening w/ Windows, though, fills me with frustration and sadness. The Microsoft Account requirement is absolutely asinine. The Windows 10 and later UI changes are ridiculous. The continued push to take away user rights on computers they own, by sinking DRM tendrils deeper into the OS, is frustrating. It feels like developers w/ little to no real world experience using Windows and who have no ability to stand up to the whims of UI "designers" (who also don't seem to acutally use Windows), sales and marketing, and the copyright cartels have been put in charge of Windows.
- toyg 2y agoThese are commercial decisions, taken way above product people in most cases. Exploitative and user-hostile management occasionally drops their mask of serene and paternalistic benevolence, revealing the ugly truth of cut-throat corporate life.
- p_ing 2y agoIt’s not an asinine requirement when you think of how users would otherwise have to store Bitlocker recovery keys. Microsoft would have to give up device encryption for the masses if there was no automatic off-device key storage. For those that truly care to use a local account, there’s a SKU for that.
- whalesalad 2y agohave you tried installing win11 and creating an account without internet access? After their most recent shenanigans, the writing is on the wall, the nails are in the coffin - https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/microsoft-has-disabled-the-popular-bypassnro-windows-11-sign-in-workaround-in-the-latest-insider-build-but-there-exists-another/ https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/microsoft... They've disabled the ability to finish Windows installation without having an internet connection and connecting your Microsoft account. > According to a Windows Insider blog post announcing Preview build 26200.5516 (KB5054687) the bypassnro.cmd script has been removed in order to "enhance security and user experience of Windows 11." > "This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account." lol. Never been a better time to jump ship to Linux, honestly. I held out for ages because I was a princess and wanted everything to be perfect. I used Linux 24x7 as an admin and developer, but from afar and never locally as my daily driver. Finally bit the bullet July '23 and it has been nothing but smooth sailing.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoI just deployed three new Windows 11 Pro machines yesterday (two HP, one Dell) with local accounts. The HP OEM image was pre-24H2 so it doesn't count, but the Dell machine was 24H2. I booted to the OOBE, hit <SHIFT>-<F10>, ran: REG ADD HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 shutdown -r -t 1 -f Waited for the machine to reboot and ran thru the OOBE w/o connecting to a network. Once I got logged-on w/ my local account connected to the Wi-Fi and joined the Active Directory domain.
- bayindirh 2y agoSorry to be blunt, but if this is not a workaround, then I don't know what is.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoYes-- that particular procedure is a workaround. My first post was asking why unattended installation, arguably a feature, is some kind of "workaround".
- Krssst 2y agoWorkarounds on Linux systems are necessary for possible hardware compatibility issues or bugs which are not intentional. Workarounds for commercial OSes are necessary to avoid user-hostile behaviors that are completely intentional and likely to get worse over time.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y agoI just stick to qubes, thanks but nothanks. To treat every OS as hostile seems to be the sane solution these days.
- Novosell 2y agoWhy should I treat my Arch installation as hostile? Seems unreasonably paranoid.
- graemep 2y agoIn case of supply chain attacks? Running a minimal OS that then runs everything else in VMs seems an effective way to minimise damage.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoUsing Qubes is orthogonal to what operating systems you're running as guests within it. Every OS is hostile, if only passively (leaking information to the network in the myriad of ways that have become acceptable today, for example).
- w4rh4wk5 2y agoYeah, but it's a breeze compared to making GNOME usable; hamburger menus everywhere!!11!
- XorNot 2y agoWait is there a way to turn those back into regular menu bars?
- whalesalad 2y agoya it's called KDE
- universa1 2y agoHmm, I've a deja-vu... My mind tells me I've read these three comments before on a different topic... If I don't forget, I'll have to check tomorrow on a real PC.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoI've been using XFCE ever since Ubuntu decided the future of desktop computing was to imagine that your monitor was an iPhone, and GNOME inexplicably decided that they needed to copy that approach as soon as possible.
- skydhash 2y agoI thought that way too (even having gone to tiling windows managers), but gnome is fine and way usable than macOS. The few applications where I use the menu still have it, and so far I’m only using one extension (for clipboard managememt).
- XorNot 2y agoFine is how I describe most things which are disappointing me. There's just no reason given the architecture of it that the hamburger menus shouldnt be toggleable to just be menu bars. And menubars were a perfectly good solution for mouse interaction.
- wallmountedtv 2y agoMy favorite is that even Microsoft themselves maintain MIT licensed debloat scripts of their own software. https://github.com/microsoft/windows-dev-box-setup-scripts/blob/master/scripts/RemoveDefaultApps.ps1 https://github.com/microsoft/windows-dev-box-setup-scripts/b...
- w4rh4wk5 2y agoI really gotta ask Microsoft about that beer they owe me :)
- qingcharles 2y agoThat's wild. They should at least give you some Microsoft dollars for their company store :)
- rs186 2y agoThis is the best joke I have seen in a while.
- nullwarp 2y agoI could have definitely used this a few weeks ago! Very nice.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoI could have used it a decade ago! Now could someone please fix the BCD store mess?
- asveikau 2y agoUnattend has been part of windows setup for way longer than a decade. The current form of it was introduced in Vista. The same concept existed before, but I know less about how it worked back then. Even without unattend, something I think people don't realize is that you can install windows on the command line. Diskpart to partition, dism /apply-image to extract files, then bcdboot to install the bootloader.
- tannhaeuser 2y agoSo have I, having failed to manage installing Win 11 without a MS account in the end. Actually I only wanted to complete a dual-boot Win 10/11 setup without having to haphazardly install Win 11 on top later, not actually use Win 11.
- cwillu 2y agoHmm, no way to turn off the sticky keys shortcuts and similar; I hit those by accident _constantly_ on new machines.
- Lammy 2y agoYou could achieve this with the “Run Custom Scripts” option and the appropriate Registry values: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys\Flags="506" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\MouseKeys\Flags="58" HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\ToggleKeys\Flags="58" See here for more a much more detailed example: https://github.com/dreikanter/win-tweaks/blob/master/completely-disable-accessibility-options.reg https://github.com/dreikanter/win-tweaks/blob/master/complet...
- chem83 2y agoMy favorite trick is to install with English (World) language to avoid auto-install of all sorts of crap. Windows Store won't work in this mode, but it's just a matter of reverting to your preferred language after first boot. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/15gk07n/english_world_as_time_and_currency_for_debloating https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/15gk07n/english_... Edit: in my experience, changing the language to something else immediately after install is done still adds the crapware automatically. I think I needed to reboot once or twice for whatever post-install service Windows runs to no longer get executed.
- accrual 2y agoFor all of Windows faults, one thing I love about it is that (with persistence and skill) you can usually bang and hammer it into whatever shape you need it to be. Someone got XP running on a 486 using only a handful of MB memory recently.
- rs186 2y agoThe millions of registry options are not for joke, I guess
- thewebguyd 2y agoYep, mostly thanks to enterprise. There's a group policy for just about anything you could ever imagine you'd want Windows to do (or not do). Granted, a lot of it isn't super discoverable, or exposed to the user in a pretty GUI (it mostly lives deep within the registry, a good chunk undocumented), but it truly is a general purpose OS in every sense of the word. Unlike most here I actually like and enjoy using Windows (doubly so with WSLv2 and the new windows terminal), although I'll admit since WSL I pretty much use Windows as if it were another Linux distro. But over the years I've come to learn a lot of the ins and outs of what it can do. That said, if Microsoft continues down this MS account, consumer hostile behavior even more it's going to be time for me to say my goodbyes to windows.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago> My favorite trick is to install with English (World) language to avoid auto-install of all sorts of crap. Edit: This sounded neat so I tried it. I just loaded up a physical box from a 24H2 ISO on a thumb drive (booted from Ventoy with no special options loaded to bypass the Microsoft Account requirement). I got an oddball "Something went wrong" / "You can try again, or skip for now" / "OOBEREGION" window with a silly and wholly inappropriate for a corporate-targeted OSA depiction of a dropped ice cream cone (pink flavor, by the look of it). I've definitely never seen this one before. I clicked "Skip" and then it proceeded thru the OOBE as I'd expect, including demanding an Internet connection. I added "BypassNRO" to the registry, rebooted, and completed the OOBE with a local account (seeing the same silly ice cream cone again). Once I got into Windows I found the Start menu looked a little emptier than normal. Memory usage seems a little lower than I'd expect. The running process list is still ridiculously long. I connected the Ethernet to a network with Internet access and didn't see a huge change. The Store app doesn't work. It returns "Sorry about that!" / "Something went wrong...". The Co-Pilot pinned shortcut returns a blue modal error dialog in the Windows 8 style saying "Search Support" / "Something happened on our end ... 0x87E10BC6". Installing this way definitely did something. I'm just not sure exactly what. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the machine updates. I already see it loading drivers and doing device detects.
- kalev 2y agoDoes anyone know if it’s possible to disable autopilot/mdm with this?
- teknopaul 2y agoWe need one of these for .debs. The answer files are easy to generate after installing once but it would be better to have an HTML ui that catered for every annoying .deb that can't think up sensible defaults for itself.
- mschuster91 2y agoFor Debian it's trivial to do so. `debconf-set-selections` is your friend, if you want something for unattended installations you can embed that into `live-boot` or into FAI. [1] https://manpages.debian.org/testing/debconf/debconf-set-selections.1.en.html https://manpages.debian.org/testing/debconf/debconf-set-sele...
- theandrewbailey 2y agoI've used unattend.xml to put C:\Users on a hard drive, leaving the rest on a SSD, so I don't need to think about what files go where. Documentation specifically warns against doing it that way, but I ran Windows 7 and 10 that way for over 12 years with precisely 0 issues with it. Now I run Linux with / on a hard drive and /usr on SSD.
- thwarted 2y agoNormally on Linux you'd put /home on a different drive/partition, which I do mainly for upgrade purposes (I upgrade my root filesystem to a new distro/distro version and then mount my home dir on the fresh install)
- RunningDroid 2y agoGP's just returning to the Unix style, though they typically had /usr on NAS (which is why some things were in /bin instead of /usr/bin, for example.)
- atVelocet 2y agoSince i‘ve been doing this sort of thing for many years here are some basic rules: - Get LTSC (W10) or IoT/Enterprise (W11) images to begin with - Get https://www.ntlite.com/ https://www.ntlite.com/ .. you won‘t find any other tool which does a better job at removing packages, adding drivers, etc. Worth every penny with great support. - Use GroupPolicies to configure your system. Take the time and download them for Office, Edge, Chrome, Firefox and update those that come with Windows. - Integrate drivers not only for the base image but also in the recovery and setup image. - Install a firewall (binisoft is fine) - Use NextDNS - If you don’t mind the security implications: Disable Defender, SmartScreen, BootGuard and VBS (use bcdedit) - Disable Microcode loading (delete the DLL) - Disable Spectre/Meltdown mitigations - If you need Office: Use the LTSC version Most third party tools are outdated or do stupid stuff which isn’t needed. You can silence Windows with the right GroupPolicies quite easy.
- p_ing 2y agoNo one should follow those suggestions. They’re wholly unnecessary and plain bad security practices. You make yourself/users significantly more vulnerable with these suggestions for no gain.
- Novosell 2y agoDisable all antivirsus capabilities, microcode and spectre/meltdown mitigations... Can't believe NSO group is here doing some weird psyop. Very funny.
- PufPufPuf 2y agoExactly what is this trying to achieve? Running a third party tool to modify the OS, disabling security features, using "downloaded" group policies (what policies?), and sending all your DNS traffic to a third party (when on PC it's possible to just modify the etc/hosts file) -- these aren't exactly the best security practices. The only reasonable suggestion is the IoT Windows version.
- 7bit 2y agoAgreed with the "what does this achieve". In Corporate environments you would use SCCM or simply the Windows ADK plus WDS. Installing a custom Firewall and Antivirus ist straight counteproductive, as ist disabling security features... obvisouly. Downloading and installing group policies however is often required and a typical enterprise scenario. Whenever I hear people praise these kind of things I know they don't really have any professional knowledge. It's fine to configure your own system, but suggesting these things SHOULD be done pisses me off to no end.
- j1elo 2y ago> Always show file extensions; Use classic context (right-click) menu; Show End task command in the taskbar; Hide search box; Do not show Bing results when searching; Enable long paths; Prevent Windows Update from rebooting your computer; ... I'd definitely love a .reg file generator website like this one, to apply some of these settings after the fact!
- kasabali 2y agoCheck WinAero tweaker. I don't remember it creating a .reg file but it can export & import the tweaks you've applied.
- nicman23 2y agocould you please add enterprise iot versions? it looks great :)
- CSDude 2y agoI love the option for "Use a solid color background:" is Windows 95 background color. I love that color.
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- 7bit 2y agoOr you know, use the Windows ADK and do it like a pro. Sigh... This is a completely useless tool...
- ralphc 2y agoThis talks about unattended installs yada yada. I go to CostCo, I buy a Windows 11 laptop, I turn it on. Does this xml file help me with this? I've done the "no internet" trick before, but does that still work?
- milgrum 2y agoThis would not help you unless you were planning to reimage the laptop. It’s a tool that makes it easier to build custom images, which are usually deployed at scale in enterprise environments.