The Great ASM installation on NT ...

ASM stands for Automatic Storage Management, an option provided in the Oracle Installations. In layman terms an ASM concept can be understood analogous to RAID concept in Operating System scenario, where we have redundant array of disks to provide high availability (in the sense that we have a backup for information retrieval with minimum loss).
So the first step to an ASM installation is:

1. Install a normal oracle database software. A 10.2.0.1 version software install will do.

2. Now if it were a normal installation of a database we would have done a Netca and Dbca installation after the software installation. Here we will go for the as usual netca installation but we need to configure few things before going for a dbca installation.

3. We first goto the bin directory of the installed oracle database software and call the asmtool.exe to create the raw disks(we need more than 1 disks to secure information , as in RAID).
The asmtool can be prompted by cmd on Windows. as:
asmtool.exe -create
eg. C:\\bin> asmtool -create C:\[oracle_home]\Disk1 1024

4. Now we set in a system environment variable OSM_INSTALL_TEST to true.

5. The next level is starting a css service. CSS stands for Cluster Synchronization Service.It is configured to start every time the system boots. This daemon process is required to enable synchronization between Oracle ASM and database instances. It must be running if an Oracle database is using ASM for database file storage.
It can be initiated by calling "localconfig.bat add" from the bin directory of ur oracle home.

6.Now we go for dbca. The last step. The dbca can be called from the bin directory of oracle home(like the netca, the bin contains netca.bat and dbca.bat and many more.....) .
When you call dbca. it gives option to configure the ASM. click and proceed. At the end it tries to mount the available disk (for us its Disk1 we created above). Going to Create Disk , we supply the path of the Disk1 but it fails........ it does not find the disk.. the problem comes here... Its smooth sailing in Linux but our concern is Windows.
The problem here is a system variable OSM_INSTALL_TEST value is not reflected. The easiest solution is to reboot or restart the explorer. But in some scenarios that's not what is required.
In a testing scenario where the farm jobs need to be automated, a reboot will create more issues.

7. So, drilling deep into the OSM_INSTALL_TEST value and from where it is read by the dbca.. took a week time to finally figure out the solution.
We need to put value in the Registry location [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_]
"OSM_INSTALL_TEST"="true".
and this works.... :) now no reboot required for ASM installation

P.S. : The article will be useful only to those going for a silent installation of the software....