$OEM$ Distribution Folders
The purpose of these $OEM$ Folders is that anything you place into there will be automatically copied to the destination hard drive of where you're installing Windows. Once copied over, you can easily create batch commands to install and perform tasks using the %systemdrive% variable. For example: If Windows was installed to the D:\ drive, the environment variable "%systemdrive%" will resolve into D:\
You might ask, "why not run application installations from the CD itself?" This is because CD-ROM drive letters are bound to be different on every PC, which shows why there's no permanent "%CDROM%" environment variable. You could however create and run a script that checks for the existance of a particular file on the CD so it maps the correct drive letter to the %CDROM% variable, but we won't be covering that in this guide (although its been discussed often in the forums so it should turn up in a search).
» The $OEM$ Distribution Folders
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As you can see on the left, the $OEM$ folder stays parallel to the i386 folder, not inside it. Anything in
$1 will be copied to the root of
the patition where Windows is installed to (C:\ for example). See the
examples below on how it all works: In preparation, the layout is: C:\XPCD\$OEM$\$1\Install\ When burned to CD (X:\ being the CD-ROM Drive letter), the layout is: X:\$OEM$\$1\Install\ When the \$OEM$\$1\Install is copied over to the hard drive during Setup, the layout is: C:\Install\ Makes sense? This is why in certain parts of the site you will find commands such as: "start /wait %systemdrive%\install\MSN\msnmsgs.msi /qb" as this gives the same output as C:\Install\ when C:\ is the Windows drive. $$ - Anything in here will be copied to the Windows folder, no matter what its called (Windows, WINNT, WindowsXP). By using this method you can create additional folders within $$ such as Resources followed by a sub-folder called Themes and place your visual styles in here. It will then be copied to C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes automatically when running Windows Setup. |
Now that you know how all this works, understanding the rest should be easy enough:
$Docs - Documents and Settings
$Progs - Program Files
$$ - Windows Folder
$1 - Root of hard drive where Windows is installed to partition.
This saves the effort of using COPY or XCOPY batch commands to copy certain files/folders over to the destination drive.