AdminImage\setup.exe /Q /I /W AdminImage\[name of file].ini /language en-us

/Q = quiet mode

/I = declares the install as deployment

/W = is for SMS and SCCM

To Create Deployable package, do the following steps...

- Run "AutoCAD_2012_English_Win_32bit.exe"

- When Install screen comes up, Click "Create Deployment" instead of Install. Follow all prompts like your doing a real install. (this is simular to doing an Admin install or a Responce file)

- Copy DeployImage folder to your network where you edit and work with packages (your results will be created in the root of install folder, mine was in C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_2012)

- After coping, look In AdminImage folder and you should have in INI file that is used to complete the install that you just created with Deployment tool. (it should be named the same as the shortcut in the root of your Deployment folder)

- AdminImage\x86\acad folder is where the Main acad.msi and your newly created .mst file the deployment tool created. This will have your serial numbers and other settings in it. If you need to edit anything, make sure you do it in a low level dbase tool like Orca. You dont want to add extra tables as this might break install.

In my case I ran into an error where AutoCad's own installer, was not recoginizing that Direct X was installed correctly on the pc, even thou AutoCad's setup.exe installed it first. So, what I did to get around this was to go into the Signature table (via the MST) and edited the file name from D3DX9_41.dll to D3DX9_42.dll. So, Autocad was doing a system search, and looking for an older file name for directX, and failing to complete the install until it saw the newer file. (FYI, this file is in System32 folder)

- On a side note, if you want to do an automated uninstall of Autocad and Language Pack via MSI, you will need to edit the following registry keys. This will allow the MSIEXEC method to Remove the product, otherwise it thinks its not installed on pc even thou you see it in ARP and Registry Entries.

Autocad

o   HKLM\Software\...\Uninstall\{5783F2D7-A001-0409-0002-0060B0CE6BBA} NoModify = 0 NoRemove = 0

Autocad Language Pack

o   HKLM\Software\...\Uninstall\{5783F2D7-A001-0409-1002-0060B0CE6BBA} NoModify = 0 NoRemove = 0

- Lastly, you can either use the vendor create Setup.exe with INI file, or you can look thru INI file to determine which prereqs you want to install yourself. I used the setup.exe to install, and then created an uninstaller exe to remove just the Autocad products and left the prereqs, like DirectX and the Visual C++ redistributables. FYI, if you try and uninstall AutoCad Language Pack before uninstall in AutoCad, you will get an error.

To be able to uninstall via MSIEXEC, you need to copy the following and save as .REG file, Then import file into your deployment so when you get ready to Uninstall Autocad, you can do so without needing the vendor's setup.exe

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{5783F2D7-A001-0409-0002-0060B0CE6BBA}]
"NoModify"=dword:00000000
"NoRemove"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{5783F2D7-A001-0409-1002-0060B0CE6BBA}]
"NoModify"=dword:00000000
"NoRemove"=dword:00000000

---  Installing silently without reboot  ---

If your using the setup.exe with ini and install keeps rebooting. You can do the following...

Read your logs files to find out which install is trying to reboot. In my case Autocad 2012 - English showed an exit code of 3010.

So, in the INI file I went to the [ACAD] section and changed EXE_PARAM=REBOOT= to read EXE_PARAM=REBOOT=ReallySuppress

In my case it will still Rebooting before the install was finished. After tracking down all of the online resources, I came acrossed a couple of post buried in the Autodesk Forums. One said to removed all non acad PreReqs from install, and do them manually. You do this by Editing the PREREQUISITE= values in the [ACAD] section (just remove the ones you dont want Setup.exe to run for you). But to my frustration the Reboot still happened. So I dug further into the Autodesk Forums, and found a post that told me to make sure MSIEXEC was at version 4.5... Mine was at ver 3.01... Starting with a clean VM, I once again installed all prereqs, including MSIEXEC ver 4.5, and then Rebooted. That is when I finally got the results I was looking for, NO REBOOT kicked off by Autocad install.

We use the admin install by calling the autocad2012.ini /language en-us via a short cut.  We found switching over to a server based license lets you install autocad in your master and then you can deploy an already confugred autocad image to the machines.

If installing autocad on Windows Vista or 7 use a server based license and install autocad to a user profile, configure it the way you want.   Sysprep the machine and copy that profile to dafault and all users will then get the custom changes you made.