Pre-pidding a SharePoint 2010 installation

You know how a number of products released by Microsoft are already pre-pidded such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and various other Microsoft products downloaded from MSDN such as Visual Studio 2010?

Well, if you frequently work with SharePoint 2010 and do not want to worry about remembering or copying down the SharePoint 2010 product key each time you wish to install SharePoint 2010, you can also pre-pid your SharePoint 2010 installation.

1. In the SharePoint 2010 ISO image, there should be a Files directory
2. Open the Files directory
3. Beneath the Files directory, you should find numerous Setup directories named Setup, SetupFarm, SetupFarmSilent, SetupFarmUpgrade, SetupSilent and SetupSingleUpgrade
4. If you open up one of these directories, you will find a config.xml file contained within.
5. You should examine each of the config.xml files to determine which one of the configurations you wish to pre-pid.  For example, the Setup directory contains an Xml node describing the SERVERROLE as SINGLESERVER.  This indicates a standalone installation.  The various other directories will have differing server roles such as APPLICATION and some directories will perform silent installations as well.
6. Once you have decided upon which config.xml file you wish to edit, you can open that respective file for editing.
7. You should then find a commented out element such as this: <!--<PIDKEY Value="Enter Product Key Here" />-->
8. Simply uncomment out the element and enter your SharePoint 2010 Product Key (either Standard or Enterprise Edition)
9. Save the resultant config.xml file
10. If you are like me, you probably prefer to simply save a new ISO image so that you can re-use it later.  There are numerous ISO image tools you can use to accomplish this such as UltraISO, MagicISO, ISOBuster and many others.  Personally, my favorite is UltraISO.
11. Once you have saved your new ISO image with the modified config.xml file, you should be ready to install a pre-pidded installation of SharePoint 2010!