Find yourself: More places for unattend.xml

[cachius]

I recently used Ventoys auto_install plugin with a Schneegans generated unattend.xml to install Windows. Gleefully I watched the command line window appear over the install UI - just to watch it grind to a harsh halt of Could not locate autounattend.xml.

It turns out that Ventoy copies the configured autounattend.xml to X:\_ventoy_auto_install_ and sets the Registry Key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Setup\UnattendFile to point to it. Which is the first location mentioned in the Implicit Answer File Search Order, the list of places where the Windows installer naturally looks for unattend.xmls.

I think it would be nice if pe.cmd supports this registry key, to mimic more of the Windows behaviour and become more self aware. Because when pe.cmd runs there must be an unattend.xml somewhere - just not neccessarily at the top of a drive.

Kind regards.

[cschneegans]

Thank you for this well-written report! I have added logic to pe.cmd to query the

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Setup]
"UnattendFile"="…"

value, and if it points to an existing file, that file is used as the answer file, with precedence over any previously found autounattend.xml file.

I ran some tests, but I do not use Ventoy – it would be great if you could verify that the code actually works with the Ventoy auto_install plugin.