On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 17:13 +0000, Hugo Monteiro wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to know if there's a simple way of trashing a prefectly good
> installation of XP, in such a way that in the next boot, if the client
> is configured to boot from the lan, it starts a brand new unattended
> install.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Hugo Monteiro.
>
>
After trying many approaches, some kindly sugested by some on this list
and about to quit, i should say, in a last type-of-joke-effort i googled
for "dd windows" and i was amazed. Right in front of my eyes there was
"dd for windows" kindly provided by John Newbigin, the same author of
explore2fs, rawwrite, etc.
(http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/rawwrite/dd.htm)
There was still the not so remote possibility that XP would prevent me
from writting to the disk. Even so i decided to give it a try.
Got a brand new disk, and with linux (used sysresccd, but tomsrtbt is
always a good choice too) and i made a backup of the disk mbr with
dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.img bs=512 count=1
In case you don't have a brand new disk, just zero the mbr before
backup it up with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1
So now i had a clean mbr. I got "dd for windows" and unpacked it in Z:
\bin\ (where all the other unattended dos binaries live). Also copied
the earlier mbr backup to Z:\packages\.
I booted up windows, mounted the net share, and issued
z:\bin\dd.exe if=z:\packages\mbr.img of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0
bs=512k count=1
as sugested by the dd on-line documentation.
To my surprise i saw the same
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
that i was used to see in linux. I then rebooted the machine, and it
started automatically re-installing.
my reinstall.bat now looks like this
@Echo off
todo.pl .reboot
todo.pl "z:\bin\dd.exe if=z:\packages\mbr.img of=\\?\Device\Harddisk0
\Partition0 bs=512k count=1"
Have fun! =)
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