Fatal Error during Windows Setup

in Microsoft

I received the following error (in a dialog box) from Windows Setup on a Terminal Server running Windows Server 2003 not long after GUI-mode setup started:

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Fatal Error
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An error has been encountered that prevents Setup from continuing.

Setup failed to install the product catalogs. This is a fatal error. The setup log files should contain more information.

Press OK to view the Setup log file.
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OK
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Unfortunately the Setup log file wasn’t much help. The actual cause of the error was related to the particular configuration of Windows. These servers utilise two RAID 1 disk sets and I am using an unattended setup to configure Windows to store user profiles (\Documents and Settings) on the second disk set (seperate from the System partition). To do this I need to launch Windows Setup from WINNT32.EXE via a Windows PE environment and just before this happens the disk partitions are created and formatted via a DISKPART script. For whatever reason, the second disk set is occasionally not formatted, so when Windows Setup gets to GUI-mode it can’t create the folder for user profiles and fail with the above error.