INFO: Not Enough Space for Files during an Unattended Setup (173825)

SUMMARY

During unattended setup, you can copy files or folders to a drive other than the primary drive (drive C) by creating a folder in the i386\$oem$ directory, and then naming that folder with the letter of the drive you wish to copy the contents of that folder to. For example, if you wanted to copy files to drive F, you would name the folder you create in the i386\$oem$ directory to "F", without the quotation marks or colon.

When doing this, the files are temporarily copied to the primary drive and then moved to the specified drive later in the setup process.

MORE INFORMATION

When doing an unattended setup using a network startup disk, the files in the i386\$oem$\<drive-letter> directory are copied to the C:\$\<drive- letter> directory during the text-mode portion of setup. The $ directory by default, will be placed on drive C unless the /T: option is used. /T: tells Winnt.exe to use another drive to place the $WIN_NT$.~LS and $ on that drive.

For more details on using the /T: option, please see the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

153768 Changing the Default Installation Drive Using Unattended Setup

Using the /T: option will also install the operating system to the specified drive, not just the files in the i386\$oem$\<drive-letter> directory. During the graphical user interface- (GUI-) mode portion of setup, the files are then copied to the destination drive.

If you are upgrading an existing Windows NT installation, the files in the i386\$oem$\<drive-letter> directory are copied to the C:\$WIN_NT$.~LS\$OEM$\<drive-letter> directory and then copied to the destination drive during the text-mode portion of setup.

If there is not enough space to hold all the files and folders on the drive you are trying to copy files to, nothing will be copied over.

If there is enough space on the active partition to do the upgrade, but there is not enough space on the active partition to copy the files from the i386\$oem$\<drive-letter> directory, at some point while copying files, the setup program will display the following error:

Setup was unable to copy the following file:
<filename>

- Press ENTER to retry the copy operation
- Press ESC to ignore the error and continue setup
- Press F3 to Exit Setup

Note: If you choose to ignore the error and continue you may encounter
errors later in setup.

The same message will appear for each subsequent file that is to be copied. As a result the installation program will subsequently fail.