Tyler Hepworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Is it possible to boot from, map a drive to, and install from DVD.
> I have branch offices overseas that I would like to ship a disk to,
> rather than trying to set up servers at each site.
In theory, yes. In practice, I know of nobody who has tried it.
Unattended treats the Z:\ drive as read-only at all times. Your
strategy would be:
- Burn the install share and the bootdisk to DVD.
- Arrange to map the DVD as Z:\ using the DOS (or Linux) boot disk.
- Set the [_meta]/z_drive value in Z:\site\unattend.txt to "D:", or
wherever the DVD appears under Windows. (This will set the %Z%
variable which all of the installation scripts use to locate
stuff.)
- Modify mapznrun.bat not to map the drive if %Z% is already
available. Oh, wait, I already did this :-).
Seriously, I have had something like this in the back of my mind from
the beginning. Everything should "just work" once you get past the
initial hurdles.
I just did some reading about DVDs. If I understand correctly, a
bootable DVD is very similar to a bootable CD; you can just use a
basic ISO-9660 file system and ISOLINUX to boot. This is good news.
I just did some more reading. There may be some subtleties involving
long file names. Joliet extensions, Rock Ridge extensions, ISO-9660
"level 2", UDF... Whatever. You need to create a DVD which is
basically ISO-9660 so ISOLINUX can read it, and it also needs to be
readable by both DOS (or Linux) and Windows. I suspect the Joliet
extensions would be sufficient.
This actually sounds like a fairly small but interesting project. I
wish I had a DVD burner. How soon do you need this, and how much time
do you have to spend on it?
- Pat
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