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FrequentlyAskedQuestions

Juan Jose Pablos

Last modified 5 years ago Last modified on 03/01/10 02:53:12

This document is part of ​Unattended, a Windows deployment system .

Introduction

The main Unattended documentation is perpetually out-of-date. It is still mostly accurate, but it is incomplete because we tend to add new features without updating the docs.

Someday I (or somebody) will crack and rewrite the documentation from scratch. Until then, this page will have to suffice. It is partly a FAQ, and partly just a collection of pointers to bits of wisdom from the ​unattended-info mailing list .

Did you say "Linux boot disk"?

Why, yes, I did.

Traditionally, Unattended had you boot to DOS to start the installation of Windows. And most of our documentation was written with this approach in mind.

It works fine, usually, but DOS has certain ​limitations which we can avoid by using Linux. If you do not care, then feel free to continue using the old boot disk.

Starting with Unattended 4.0, we are shipping a Linux boot disk in addition to the DOS boot disk. Note that this is not for installing Linux; we are simply booting a custom diskless Linux system to initiate the installation of Windows. The Linux boot disk is very new and our documentation has not been updated for it, but it works a lot like the DOS boot disk. There is some documentation on how to compile the CVS version with GCC4 linuxboot? It runs the same Perl code, in fact, which we think is kind of neat. At present, it only supports booting from CD-ROM (using the linuxboot/linuxboot.iso image) or network (using the linuxboot/tftpboot tree).

You can upgrade a pre-4.0b version of Unattended to use the Linux boot disk by just ​copying some new stuff to the Z: drive.

If you are booting from the network, you can ​edit pxelinux.cfg/default to override the bootdisk defaults (Z: share, username, password). The boot disk uses Linux kernel 2.6.4, whose hardware support is still maturing. We are interested in your success/failure reports; please send them to unattended-devel.

Can I use Cygwin to rebuild the disk images on Windows?

For the DOS boot disk, ​yes .

For the Linux boot disk, no. Probably not, anyway.

Can I boot from a USB stick?

Yes. Er, maybe. Probably. (coming soon)

There is some rudimentary information about USBKeychainBooting available.

Can I install over a wireless LAN?

​Yes , with the help of a commercial product.

Adding wireless support to our (free) DOS boot disk would be difficult, because as far as I know, there are no wireless drivers for DOS.

Adding wireless support to our Linux boot disk is a Simple Matter of Programming, at least for the wireless devices which Linux supports. Call it a "to-do" item. The hard part is designing and implementing an interface to let the user set the wireless parameters (like ESSID). If you would like to help tackle this, subscribe to the ​unattended-devel mailing list and ask what's up.

Can I install Windows NT?

​Not right now . Patches are welcome.

Can I install Windows 95/98/ME?

No, and I think this would be hard. ​Some interest has been expressed on the mailing list.

Can I use a serial console?

This should be possible using either boot disk. See ​this thread on the mailing list.

Can I install from DVD-ROM instead of a network share?

We are interested in adding support for this. See ​this thread from the mailing list, especially ​this followup from Pablo Manzanera. Patches are welcome...

Why do you always install IIS?

​We have reasons . You can always disable it in unattend.txt.

How do I enable Windows XP' Internet Connection Firewall?

The instructions for this are somewhat confusing, and I have not yet had time to try them myself. The question ​comes up on the mailing list from time to time.

Searching for [Homenet] and InternetConnectionFirewall on Google ​Web and ​Groups turns up some slightly contradictory information.

How do I disable sound?

See ​this thread from the mailing list.

Is FAT -> NTFS conversion a bad idea?

As Microsoft describes in "​NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP ", FAT -> NTFS conversion normally results in a file system with 512-byte clusters and a fragmented Master File Table (MFT).

With Windows XP, Microsoft provides two tools (OFORMAT and CVTAREA) to address these problems. ​I asked the FreeDOS folks about running OFORMAT under FreeDOS, and ​they responded by adding a switch (/a) to FreeDOS FORMAT which does the same thing. Unattended now uses this switch, so we get a 4K cluster size after NTFS conversion, at least on Windows XP and Server 2003.

Using CVTAREA is on the "to-do" list.

That said, I and others have installed hundreds of machines without using OFORMAT nor CVTAREA, and they work fine.

  • Can_the_reliance_on_a_2GB_FAT_partition_be_removed?

Windows is installed and converted to NTFS. But what about additional drives?

=

Some solutions from the mailing-list: 

todo.pl "start /wait format e: /fs:NTFS /v:temp /q /y"

todo.pl "%z%\bin\sleep.exe 120"

todo.pl "start /wait format d: /fs:NTFS /v:applications /q /y"

Hmm. Not sure when you want to do this, I'm formatting D: etc. first

with parted using fat32, then have 

todo.pl ".ignore-err 1 echo j|convert D: /FS:NTFS /X "

in base.bat, so I can have e.g. the profiles dir(s) there.

Or (if D: is empty at this time) I use 

todo.pl ".ignore-err 4 format D: /FS:NTFS /Q /X /Y "

How do I change the default profiles directory?

"computer1","ProfilesDir","D:\Dokumente und Einstellungen"

If you want to use this, you will maybe have to Format Drives?, too.

Patrick J. LoPresti? patl@…

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