drivers - Unattended Vista without Monitor

I have a laptop with a busted monitor (I can only see the leftmost inch of the screen). I need to reinstall Vista on this computer. However, the external monitor is a function of the video card drivers; it is not hardware.

Option 1: Install Vista with a regular disc
Outcome: Cannot see the screen to select options

Option 2: Use WAIK to create a sysprepped image with an unattended answer file. Connect laptop hard drive to desktop to apply image, then put laptop hard drive back in laptop and start up
Outcome: Arrives at login screen. I type in the password (without seeing anything, mind you), press enter. The computer then does a full restart. I have no idea why, I cannot diagnose, since the monitor isnt working yet (Video drivers havent been installed)

Option 3: Use vLite to create an unattended Vista disc with drivers pre-loaded.
Outcome: During testing (Virtual PC), the first thing the disc does is prompt me for hard drive partitioning.

It looks like I need to figure out how to install video drivers with sysprep (to fix Option 2) or automatically partition/format the drive in a vLite DVD (Option 3)

Any other options?

Answer

Here is another thing to try while you wait for a better solution. Since you stated you have another computer I am assuming this is possible.

1. Download VirtualBox


2. Install it on your Desktop computer


3. Create a new Virtual Machine


4. Create an ISO of your Vista installation media


5. Mount the ISO inside the virtual machine and insert the Vista disc into the laptop


6. Start up both the Laptop and the Virtual Machine

Since you are going through the same setup on both machines you can see on the virtual machine what the current step is and how many times you need to click tab for instance to get to certain option. The virtual machine will give you an idea of what is on the screen of the laptop. You will be able to tell when the laptop is waiting for input as there will be no Hard Drive activity and hopefully the little bit of the screen that you can see will give you more hints. After install you will also be able to use the Vista virtual machine to figure out what commands and keys have to be pressed to enable remote desktop on the laptop. That way after installation you will be able to control the laptop through the network.

After you are done you can just delete the virtual machine and even get rid of VirtualBox if you don't see yourself using it in the future. Also when you are installing on the virtual machine make sure that you don't allow it to have a network adapter. That way you can type in the product key and it won't count as being used as it will never verify it with Microsoft.