A headless install is possible if your current BIOS boot order allows for an USB or network boot, before the disk controller.
Using a fully unattended setup, you can have a hands free install. This requires you to provide:
- WinPE's locale and language
- disk layout
- Windows locale and language
- Windows time zone
- skipping OOBE (except for the last two options: SkipMachineOOBE, SkipUserOOBE)
- creating a Local Account as primary user
- skipping auto activation
- creating a Computer Name
1. From the
Unattended screen, Enable
Unattended mode in the Toolbar.
2.
Auto-fill / All
3. Scroll down to Out-of-box experience, and change
Skip 'Get going fast' page (Privacy options) to
true.
View attachment 15517
4.
Configure disk / Disk template (if you have a licensed NTLite edition). Otherwise, you need to create the disk layout by hand, one partition at a time. W11 24H2+ will require a Recovery partition, as it's not optional.
5. From the
Settings screen, change
System / Remote Desktop ->
Default
6. From the
Post-Setup screen, add a
(Before Logon) task to enable the Windows Firewall rule to allow Remote Desktop access.
Code:
netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="remote desktop" new enable=Yes
7. Apply changes. Create a bootable USB from the ISO.
8. Because this setup is headless, you will have a problem with DHCP if you don't know which address was assigned to the PC (unless you have reserved addresses). It may be simpler to temporarily switch to a static IP.
Write a short batch file to set your network config:
Code:
netsh interface ipv4 set address name="Ethernet" static <Your_IP_Address> <Subnet_Mask> <Default_Gateway>
netsh interface ipv4 set dns name="Ethernet" static <Primary_DNS_IP> index=1
netsh interface ipv4 add dns name="Ethernet" <Secondary_DNS_IP> index=2
Run this script from Post-Setup
(Before logon).
