I would like to help with this project. I have as much time to devote to it as you desire. I understand all that you are saying and am ready to give it a shot. The only thing I am not sure on is hard coding the drive letter in unattend.txt. What if there are multiple optical drives on the machine and the DVD is not always on D:? Is there a way to dynamically adjust for that scenario?
Tyler > -----Original Message----- > From: Patrick J. LoPresti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, March 01, 2004 2:07 PM > To: Tyler Hepworth > Cc: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' > Subject: Re: [Unattended] Installing from DVD > > > 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
