This document is part of Unattended, a Windows
deployment system.
The main Unattended documentation is perpetually out-of-date. It is still mostly accurate, but it is incomplete because we tend to add new features without updating the docs.
Someday I (or somebody) will crack and rewrite the documentation from scratch. Until then, this page will have to suffice. It is partly a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list, and partly just a collection of pointers to bits of wisdom from the unattended-info mailing list.
Why, yes, I did. And if you are using it, you should definitely read this section.
Traditionally, Unattended had you boot to DOS to start the installation of Windows. And most of our documentation was written with this approach in mind.
It works fine, usually, but DOS has certain limitations which we avoid by using Linux.
Starting with Unattended 4.0, we are shipping a Linux boot disk in
addition to the DOS boot disk. Note that this is not for installing
Linux; we are simply booting a custom diskless Linux system to
initiate the installation of Windows. The Linux boot disk is very new
and our documentation has not been updated for it, but it works a lot
like the DOS boot disk. It runs the same Perl code, in fact, which we
think is kind of neat. At present, it only supports booting from
CD-ROM (using the linuxboot/linuxboot.iso
image) or
network (using the linuxboot/tftpboot
tree).
You can upgrade a pre-4.0 version of Unattended to use the Linux
boot disk by just copying some new stuff to the Z:
drive.
If you are booting from the network, you can override the bootdisk
defaults (Z:
share, username, password) by editing pxelinux.cfg/default or by
setting DHCP option 233.
If you are using Samba 3.x as your Unattended server, you probably
want to set unix extensions
to off
.
See this message for details.
Yes, and if it does not work for you, we are very interested in fixing it. The boot disk uses Linux kernel 2.6, which is still maturing.
One common problem is with ACPI support in Linux, which is under
very active development. If the boot disk has trouble with your
hardware, try booting with ACPI support disabled. Hold down the
Shift key while booting, which will present a
boot:
prompt. Then type
unattended acpi=off and press Enter. If
this helps, the bug is in the Linux ACPI support and we would like to
report it to the Linux developers. (We would disable ACPI by default,
but then some hardware would not work at all.)
Also try using noapic
or nolapic
instead
of (or in addition to) acpi=off
. These disable the 2.6
kernel's new APIC and "local APIC" support, which may help in rare
cases.
If none of these work, perhaps your network or mass storage hardware is not yet supported by our boot disk. Usually, this just means our code to detect hardware and load drivers needs tweaking, since Linux itself has fairly broad hardware support. But we need somebody who actually has the hardware to report a problem and test our fixes, so please let us know.
Another common problem is with case sensitivity, especially if you have RequireSecuritySignature enabled on your file server (as Windows
Server 2003 does by default). The usual symptom is that the
installation script is unable to find any OS directories, because the
files within have names like I386\TXTSETUP.SIF
instead of
i386\txtsetup.sif
. The solution is to rename all of the
files on the installation media to lower case. The lower-caseify.pl
script automates this.
Not usually.
Starting with version 4.0 of Unattended, we switched from MS-DOS to FreeDOS. Apart from general principles (we like free software), this avoids potential legal issues. But FreeDOS is still under development, and it occasionally has difficulty with some hardware.
The UMB provider in particular can be somewhat touchy. Try editing
config.sys
to comment out the loading of
EMM386.EXE
, or to load UMBPCI.SYS
instead.
Commenting out both is the most reliable path, but it may leave
insufficient conventional memory for the Windows installer to run.
Two reasons. But probably because your message "smells like spam" and got held for manual approval.
The two most common causes are:
From: "Patrick J. LoPresti" <patl@users.sourceforge.net>
and dislikes From: patl@users.sourceforge.net
.The install share must be an actual share like
\\server\install
, not a subfolder like
\\server\install\subfolder
.
With the DOS boot disk, you must use a NetBIOS (or WINS) name for the server, not a DNS name nor
IP address. This is a limitation of the MSCLIENT network stack; if
you figure out how to fix it, let us know. (Loading
dnr.exe
does not seem to help).
With the Linux boot disk, it is the other way around; you must use a DNS name or IP address, not a NetBIOS name. We can change this pretty easily, so let us know if it bothers you.
This usually happens on laptops without a floppy drive. Our CD-ROM
(and PXE) DOS boot uses a "virtual floppy" provided by memdisk
, so you must enable floppy disk support in
your BIOS even if you have no physical drive.
The Toshiba Tecra S1 has an additional problem: You must disable "USB legacy floppy emulation" before memdisk will work. See this thread and this message from the mailing list.
For the DOS boot disk, yes.
For the Linux boot disk, no. Probably not, anyway.
Yes, using the Linux-based boot disk. (To USB-boot the DOS disk, see Eugene's instructions.)
I got this working on a 256M Sandisk Cruzer Mini, but the procedure should be the same for any USB drive.
I used a Linux machine to prep the drive. You can probably use a Windows machine to do all of this stuff; if you figure it out, feel free to let us know and we will update these instructions.
First, I needed to repartition and reformat the drive, because the
original partition table was an unholy mess which confused the boot
loader. I plugged the drive into my RedHat 9 Linux machine and used
"dmesg" to see that it was autoprobed as /dev/sda
. (It
may have a different name on your system, especially if you already
have SCSI disks.) Then I ran:
parted /dev/sda mklabel msdos # Use double-dash to prevent Parted from treating -0 as a switch parted -- /dev/sda mkpartfs primary fat16 0 -0 parted /dev/sda set 1 boot on
These commands blow away the existing partition table, create and
format a new FAT16 partition spanning the entire drive, and mark that
partition "active" (bootable), respectively. Obviously, I used
Parted; you could presumably use fdisk
and
mkdosfs
instead.
Then I wrote a script (install-mbr.pl) to replace the Master Boot Record. This script
is in the linuxboot/tools
directory of the Unattended
distribution. Just about any MBR should work, but I installed the one
from FreeDOS:
cd .../unattended-4.1/linuxboot tools/install-mbr.pl misc/freedos-mbr.bin /dev/sda
Next, I ran the SYSLINUX installer on the drive:
syslinux /dev/sda1
The SYSLINUX distribution includes an installer which will run under Linux, DOS, and Windows. Well, three different installers, actually... But they do the same thing, which is to install the SYSLINUX boot sector and the LDLINUX.SYS auxiliary file onto the drive.
Finally, I copied bzImage
, initrd
, and
the PXELINUX configuration file from the Linux-based boot disk to the
USB stick:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt cd .../unattended-4.1/linuxboot cp tftpboot/{bzImage,initrd} /mnt cp tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default /mnt/syslinux.cfg umount /mnt
The penultimate step renames pxelinux.cfg/default to syslinux.cfg. This is because PXELINUX and SYSLINUX use different names for their configuration files, although the files have essentially the same syntax; see the SYSLINUX documentation for details.
To actually use the bootable USB key, your BIOS must support booting from USB hard drives (not just floppy drives). Generally, desktops from 2003 or later and laptops from 2004 or later have this support, while earlier machines may or may not. Consult your BIOS documentation or ask your system vendor.
Yes, although not as easily as we would like. I use this procedure. See also this thread on the mailing list.
Yes, with the help of a commercial product.
Adding wireless support to our (free) DOS boot disk would be difficult, because as far as I know, there are no wireless drivers for DOS.
Adding wireless support to our Linux boot disk is a Simple Matter of Programming, at least for the wireless devices which Linux supports. Call it a "to-do" item. The hard part is designing and implementing an interface to let the user set the wireless parameters (like ESSID). If you would like to help tackle this, subscribe to the unattended-devel mailing list and ask what's up.
Not right now. Patches are welcome.
No, and I think this would be hard. Some interest has been expressed on the mailing list.
Yes, using either the DOS-based or the Linux-based boot disk.
We are interested in adding support for this. See this thread from the mailing list, especially this followup from Pablo Manzanera. Patches are welcome...
We have reasons. You can disable it by adding these lines to
Z:\site\unattend.txt
:
[Components] ; Do not install IIS iis_common=Off iis_inetmgr=Off iis_www=Off iis_pwmgr=Off iis_doc=Off
The instructions for this are somewhat confusing, and I have not yet had time to try them myself. The question comes up on the mailing list from time to time.
Searching for [Homenet]
and
InternetConnectionFirewall
on Google Web
and Groups
turns up some slightly contradictory information.
With Windows 2000 and higher, and assuming your printers support it, you can use the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) instead of LPD. This lets you use an HTTP URL to specify the printer. Most modern network printers support IPP.
I once made a USENET post describing how to configure an HP LaserJet 4050 automatically.
Because Pat does not trust QChain.
See this thread and this message from the mailing list.
This comes up on the mailing list now and then. At the moment, you must have a good understanding of TXTSETUP.OEM files, because you must create one by hand which incorporates all of your drivers. Writing a tool to help automate this is on our to-do list.
As Microsoft describes in "NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP", FAT -> NTFS conversion normally results in a file system with 512-byte clusters and a fragmented Master File Table (MFT).
With Windows XP, Microsoft provides two tools (OFORMAT and CVTAREA)
to address these problems. I asked the FreeDOS folks about running OFORMAT under FreeDOS,
and they responded by adding a switch (/a
) to FreeDOS
FORMAT which does the same thing. Unattended now uses this switch, so
we get a 4K cluster size after NTFS conversion, at least on Windows XP
and Windows Server 2003.
Using CVTAREA is on our "to-do" list.
That said, I and others have installed hundreds of machines without using OFORMAT nor CVTAREA, and they work fine.