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 ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info