Silent install of Japanese IME on XP SP2

October 11, 2006 5:50 AM

What's the right way to do a silent install of the Japanese input language and IME in an already setup English-language Windows XP Professional SP2?

I don't want a full Japanese Windows user interface (MUI); all I want is Japanese input ability for word processing etc. It's easy to do it with the GUI, but I would rather do it quietly in a logon script than force my users to get this procedure right.

Under Windows 98, this was easy. XP has made it hard again.

The Microsoft silent install docs give a procedure using Rundll32 to launch intl.cpl, but the method described for locating the required support files on a network share doesn't appear to work; I get GUI prompts asking for the XP SP2 installation CD regardless of what I use for OemFilesPath under [Unattended].

My current best effort involves altering the "Installation Sources" value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup registry key to make it point to a network folder containing a complete copy of the XP SP2 installer CD, then using

start /wait Rundll32 shell32,Control_RunDLL intl.cpl,,/f:"P:\Installers\Microsoft\Global IME\xp-settings.txt”

where xp-settings.txt contains

[RegionalSettings]
LanguageGroup="1","7"
SystemLocale=0c09
UserLocale=0c09
InputLocale=0c09:00000409,0411:e0010411

This kind of works, but as well as English (Australia) - US and Japanese, it also installs English (US) - US which I don't want.

It seems to me that I must have missed something. Surely it's not supposed to be this hard. Surely there ought to be something for XP that that I could just download and run, like jamondo.exe for Windows 98. Anybody know what it is?

Failing that, does anybody know a programmatic way to make intl.cpl look in a network folder for files it needs to install, without needing to munge the registry first?

posted by flabdablet to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Failing that, does anybody know a programmatic way to make intl.cpl look in a network folder for files it needs to install, without needing to munge the registry first?

Not exactly – but could you not do something like:

start /wait regedit /s regfile.reg

Before the rest, where regfile overwrites whichever MRU list intl.cpl normally looks at with just the location of your files?
posted by ed\26h at 6:24 AM on October 11, 2006

That's exactly how I'm currently doing the registry munge.

Unfortunately, the MRU list in question is a REG_MULTI_SZ containing multiple strings, so simply blasting it with another .reg file as I am doing wipes them all out.

This is going to cause future trouble for some of my workstations, which have pathnames for non-Microsoft driver installation folders listed inside that value as well as the usual D:\ for the Windows XP SP2 CD-ROM.

Yes, I could write code to append my network installation path to the existing REG_MULTI_SZ. No, I'm not keen to do so. Surely there's a normal, standard, easy way to do this job that I've just been missing?

The gratuitous appearance of English (US) has also got me stuffed. If anybody can figure out where that's coming from, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:16 AM on October 11, 2006

While we're at it: does anybody know where I can find a document that describes command line parameters understood by intl.cpl when invoked via RunDLL32 in this way? Surely /f: can't be the only one.
posted by flabdablet at 7:19 AM on October 11, 2006

It looks like from the first article you posted that you should be able to call winnt32 with the options file you've created, not necessarily the CPL directly.

winnt32.exe /unattend:"path to answer file" copysource:lang /s:"path to install source"
posted by morallybass at 10:01 AM on October 11, 2006

winnt32.exe, unless I'm badly mistaken, is Windows Setup. I'm sure I don't need to do a complete reinstall of Windows just to accomplish what the Regional and Language Options control panel applet GUI can do in about five clicks.

If winnt32.exe sees an answer file that doesn't specify all setup options, I believe it issues GUI prompts for what's missing rather than doing a subset of the full install.
posted by flabdablet at 5:28 PM on October 11, 2006

KB 289125: How to create the regional and language settings for an unattended installation of Windows MultiLanguage Version.

See also the relevant blog entry in Michael Kaplan's blog. He could probably give you answers if you're still having problems.
posted by Sharcho at 5:38 AM on October 12, 2006

Or you could just create an AutoIt script to handle the dialog that pops up (using the AdlibEnable function).
posted by Sharcho at 5:45 AM on October 12, 2006

Sharcho, the Kaplan blog looks like exactly the right place to find the answers I need. Bookmarked for future use. Thanks!
posted by flabdablet at 4:58 PM on October 12, 2006