<drool><drool> I like your thinking. I love the Linux boot idea. I've been messing with this dos issue most of the day and am going to have to do a hack to copy stuff from CD tomorrow so I can get back on track. I'll send you my changes if they are any good. The plan is: Create a non-bootable cd with the files from "z:\winxpsp1", add an entry in "z:\site\unattend.txt" like:
doit_cmd="d:\winxpsp1\i386\winnt /s:d:\winxpsp1\i386 /u:c:\netinst\unattend.txt" ...to run the setup from the CD. The only real work is integrating CD drivers with the boot disks. Any interest in integrating CD drivers once I get it worked out? I imagine that I have an example of doing this from a previous life. Does anyone have info about adding CD drivers to the boot disk quickly at hand? The project that you referenced looks interesting. I'm not sure if I'm on board with using wget to move everything across the network. Maybe there is a super striped down samba client (smbmount) implementation that would allow connecting to a windows resource for file transfer. Thanks for verifying that I'm not crazy, Scott -----Original Message----- From: Patrick J. LoPresti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 4:43 PM To: Scott Card Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Unattended] Network too fast for DOS? I would guess the gigabit box is overwhelming the PC and triggering a bug in the MSCLIENT TCP/IP stack. At least one other person got Unattended working from CD-ROM, but I am not sure if he is on the mailing list. If you find yourself making changes which are still compatible with the network-based install, I would be glad to add them to the stock distribution. Now to change the subject :-). There is a more radical option which I have been seriously considering for a while. We could ditch the DOS boot disk and use Linux instead. Pros: Linux has a real network stack, so problems like yours could be avoided. Linux can partition the hard drive without needing to reboot. Under Linux, we *might* be able to create and populate a native NTFS partition, avoiding the FAT -> NTFS conversion step. I am told this step leaves the disk badly fragmented, especially the OS files. Linux is just cool. Cons: Since Linux is a protected mode OS, we have no universal drivers for the NIC or the disk controller. So we would need a good way to add network, SCSI, and RAID drivers. Using Linux is arguably more complex, and scarier for Windows types. For an idea of what I am thinking, see what these folks have done: https://penguin.ucs.ed.ac.uk/dstwiki/index.php/BootOptions I think they are using imaging, though. I am envisioning running winnt.exe under dosemu, or maybe just copying the files directly to the hard drive and booting from there... Thoughts? - Pat
