10 April 2014

How to remove shortcuts during an MSI installation

It is very easy to stop shortcuts from being installed during an MSI installation. The first thing you will need is ORCA or Super ORCA. These applications will allow you to open up and edit the contents of the MSI. Once you have the MSI opened up in either app, go to the shortcut table as shown in the pic below. Once there, right-click on each row and click drop-row. That is all that is to preventing shortcuts from being installed.


07 April 2014

Message containing password has been suppressed error

In my experience, this error was caused by me manually editing the unattend.xml file associated with an imported operating system. Specifically, I had manually entered the UnattendedJoin credentials within the unattend.xml file. Apparently when you manually enter the credentials in there, and they are in plain text, this error will occur when you override those credentials in the customsettings.ini file. To fix this, either re-import the operating system image or make sure the plain text credentials match in both the customsettings.ini and the unattend.xml files.