zenworks

HP, as far as I'm concerned, has some of the most insane driver and software installs ever. They are right up next to Adobe, as far as craziness, some of the time.
At work, we just attempted to install the LJ M1530 multi-fuction printer. Of course there were issues as always with new devices like this in a proper enterprise environment. There are at least 5 workstations that the device driver needed to be loaded on. Once I hear that I wondered why I wasn't scripting the install.
So I downloaded the M1530's driver. The first thing I did was use 7-zip to unzip the contents of hp_M1530_MFP_full_Solution_usb_n_w.exe. I found the usual HP mess of install files with no useful instructions for a silent install.
I dug up what looked like the main install executable under the Installer directory and ran it with the /? argument.

hpbcsiInstaller.exe /?
The following text is what I got back

I can't think of a much crappier install than Pinnacle Studio 12 for automated deployments other than perhaps some Adobe stuff. Their msi gives you absolutely no way of filling in the information ahead of time for your serial number and registration information. I wonder if the folks at Pinnacle have heard of a little thing called large friggin workstation deployments! I started down the horrible nightmarish road of having to use AutoIt to manually pump keystrokes into the registration dialogue box. Oh man did I hate that! OK rant over. All that being said, I kind of stumbled upon a solution.Here is how I got it working.First I ran the install and manually went through the registration process. Evidently this creates a bunch of files in "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle\Pixie". If these files exist before you start the install process on a workstation, the registration information will already be setup in the registration dialogue. Hmmm fascinating!  So basically I just setup a little pre distribution script that copies those files down before I start the silent install of the MSI. xcopy /y/e/s/i/q/r "\\Network Location\pinnacle-studio-12\Pinnacle" "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle"The network location is the "Pinnacle" directory that goes under "Application Data"