Installing Powershell during unattended Windows Server 2003 installation

29 Apr 2008
For the past couple days I have been working on fully automating a Windows Server 2003 installation, complete with all software I want on it. The idea is that when the automated installation completes, I can sysprep the system and clone it to create N ISA servers quite fast, to play with.

More information on this installation process later.

What I want to post right now are the difficulties I'm running into when installing the .NET framework from within the installation process of Windows. I'm running a script from the "[SetupParams]" section in the WINNT.SIF answer file.

The script tries to install "dotnetfx3.exe" (.NET 3.0 framework) but fails for some reason. So now I'm following some instructions that specify how to install "dotnetfx.exe" (.NET 2.0 framework) instead.

I get the following error: "Error 25007. Error occurred while initializing fusion. Setup could not load fusion with LoadLibraryShim(). Error: The handle is invalid."



A workaround:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2006/05/06/591694.aspx

But that one doesn't seem applicable to me. maybe I should try to install dotnetfx3.exe again, but this time when the user logs in for the first time and making sure that administrator is logged in automagically at first boot.

Bah!