Re: Unattend over network with USB boot device

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From: Gerry Hickman (gerry666uk_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 03/16/04 

Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 20:45:37 +0000

Hi Patrick,

Excellent ideas!

I can see Linux is way ahead when working the O/S at this level. You are
also right about partitions; at present I have ExtendOEMPartition which
is great for the C: drive, but I have to do the others manually after
Windows is installed. About 3 minutes work per box.

I don't understand booting DOS from a FAT32 partition though? How will
it see the file system upon which it resides? I could format the memory
stick to FAT32, use a DOS floppy with the SYS command to copy the boot
sector across, but then when I try to boot... how will DOS "see" itself?
Let's assume it can "see" itself, surely we're back to the same problem
- the memory stick will become the C drive...

Apparently there's a secret DOS command called "Assign" that can be used
to change drive letter in DOS, but it was pulled from more recent
distributions - does anyone have this file or know more about it?

Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:

> 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 

-- 
Gerry Hickman (London UK)

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