I need to find a way to do a silent windows xp install.  In short, i
want a bootable cd that copies the i386 directory onto the hard drive
and then runs the setup from the hard drive.  I also want the install
to happen silently (i.e. i don't want to have to set the time zone). 
If possible, i would still like to be able to enter a product key, but
i could always change that after installation.

russellz-ga:

You can search for "unattended Windows XP installation" and find the
instructions.  The following are good starting points:

http://unattended.msfn.org/
http://www.svrops.com/svrops/documents/xpunattend.htm
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

--
I am not an official GA researcher.

I've used "unattended.sourceforge.net" successfully to automate the
distribution completely from network. It's a good thing. The main
thing is to actually create the unattended.txt properly.