Re: Unattend over network with USB boot device

From: Patrick J. LoPresti (patl_at_users.sourceforge.net)
Date: 03/16/04 

To: "Gerry Hickman" <gerry1uk@netscape.net>
Date: 16 Mar 2004 10:19:01 -0500

Hi, Gerry. I have been planning to play with this, too, but my USB
stick is on back-order. Great minds think alike :-).

Here are some thoughts.

DOS should only see the drive as C: if it recognizes the partition
type. So one option is to use a file system which DOS does not
recognize. For example, you might try booting DOS 6 from a FAT32
partition.

DOS will need a way to find its own files, of course. But if you use
SYSLINUX+memdisk to boot a virtual floppy, this will be no problem.

My favorite option, and the one I intend to try, is to boot a diskless
Linux system and run winnt.exe under dosemu. Actually, this is now
supported and working in the current release of
<http://unattended.sourceforge.net/>. We provide ISO-9660 and PXE
images, but they are identical except for the boot loader (ISOLINUX
vs. PXELINUX, respectively). The exact same images should boot fine
from a USB stick using SYSLINUX. Once the diskless Linux system is
booted, you are home free.

There are several advantages to this approach:

  1) You can partition the drive without rebooting.

  2) The dosemu environment, being a virtual machine, is entirely
     under your control. So you can make any disk be the "C: drive".

  3) The emulated environment accesses the network and disk via Linux,
     which is faster than DOS (even with the emulation). I no longer
     use smartdrv when installing XP!

  4) Using Linux to install Windows is just cool, in a perverse sort
     of way.

If you are interested, let me know and I can spell this out in more
detail. It is actually pretty simple...

 - Pat

"Gerry Hickman" <gerry1uk@netscape.net> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Bored with floppies, and with some machines no longer having them by
> default, I decided to make a USB boot device that can load up real-mode
> Win98, connect to the network and run WINNT.EXE from there.
>
> However, there's a major problem! The boot device ends up being drive C: I
> don't know of any way to change it. When I try to run WINNT from the network
> (even with the /t switch), it trashes the boot sector of the USB device and
> copies $WIN_NT$.~BT to it along with various other files such as $LDR$ and
> NTLDR.
>
> If I unplug the USB device just before running WINNT, setup fails saying
> "can't access C drive press 'r' to retry".
>
> It seems this goes back to the old problem of how DOS assigns drive letters.
> The USB device is running under "Emulation" and therefore DOS sees it as the
> first fixed drive on the first controller! Arrrrh.
>
> --
> Gerry Hickman
> SSRU SysAdmin

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