bj-kaiser

ever thought about netbooting winpe? cause that would solve the issue with the external drive, if thats not necessary for reasons I dont know. Otherwise, do some scripting with the language of your choice and build something around diskpart.exe. Shouldnt be to hard, personally I considered that idea and played around with autoit and diskpart, but I found it easier to just pull a diskpart script from a database and let diskpart execute it.

Read AutoIt's help entry about "WinSetState". I'm to lazy to repeat that all here Besides the help file does explain almost everything good enough.

couldn't you just use diskpart scripts? (just some idea) Make batchfiles/links to predefined diskpart scripts.

Can't say I have ever used Ubuntu/Xubuntu on a machine similar to yours, so I can't help you compare. I can only go by system requirements, where Xubuntu only needs 128 MB RAM as opposed to Kubuntu/Ubuntu which needs 256 MB RAM as minimum requirement. you have 2 options for upgrading, either upgrade your existing installation, and upgrade the way 5.04 -> 5.10 -> 6.06 (as recommended by ubuntu), or download Xubuntu alternate cd (textmode installer) and do a new installation. Downside is, as far as I can tell the problem with serial mice still persists. So you will still have to configure your mouse by hand. The upgrade/new installation will 'only' give you a newer system (including applications) and a less hardware hungry GUI. Your's to decide if you want to do it. useful links: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DapperUpgrades http://www.xubuntu.org/get

for such a system as you have, you should go with a GUI that hasn't to high system requirements, like XFCE. Besides, for 5.04 you won't get any security updates. (I'd encourage you to at least get the 6.06/LTS release) have a look at http://www.xubuntu.org

Some sources of information about unattended switches and settings: http://www.uawiki.org http://unattended.sourceforge.net/installers.php

if you take a SP2 cd as your source for any unattended project, you have nothing to do. Since the SP2 is not a separated part of the installation, but integrated into the setup files (i.e. the original files have been replaced by SP2 ones).

look in the documentation of the waik regarding 'winpeshl.ini' just use something like this in the system32\winpeshl.ini [LaunchApps] "wpeutil /disablefirewall" "cmd" if you add other commands as well, make sure you have the shell (be it cmd.exe or litestep for me) as last entry, otherwise WinPE will just reboot if the last application exits.

I have never dealt with Ghost, but I would think the server opens a connection to the client when multicasting, right? and now we take the by default enabled firewall of Windows PE 2.0 in that scheme ... maybe this is the reason ghost won't work? try 'wpeutil disablefirewall' on your Win PE session.

no, all that goes through the router with this setup is ComputerX <-> WLAN ComputerX <-> Internet Traffic between the computers will not leave the Gigabit switch (if its not broadcasted).

what about Imagex that is in the WAIK and on the Vista DVD? It would have been nicer if they hadnt forget to flush the console buffers (you cant read the console output until it exits). But so far you get it for free from MS and the save/restore times are not that bad.

what about LiteStep? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep I've toyed around with it in the past on Windows XP. But I can't say if it will run on a 'micro' XP.

Sorry, I understood it like the application that calls the various exe files was your own work.

I dont know what script language you use, but here goes one example for AutoIt3: Run("your.exe -your_switch", "", @SW_HIDE) Should also be possible to do something like that with windows scripting, which would have the advantage of not needing an additional interpreter, because the Windows script host is included in most windows installations (IIRC). But I only know it for AutoIt. On second thought, maybe you can modify your application so it sets the show flag of the called applications to 'hidden'.

Yes, it is possible with Grub/grub4dos, but the wkole point should be that one should be able to do everything in the MBR, i.e. in 512 bytes ... Check these Open Source MBR, fitting in 512 bytes and it should be possible to use them this way: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/OS-BS-ride...mbldr-t334.html http://www.boot-land.net/forums/MBR-Boot-Manager-t1105.html mbldr is what I have been searching for. Now I just need to find out the scancode of the 'Access IBM' key.But that should be to find somewhere on the web.

there is no such thing by default. If one wanted a progress bar, you would have to modify the installer to add a progress bar page if there is a specific command line switch used.

the idea is interesting, and certainly already used. From my IBM T42 I know that IBM used some Windows PE there. It all works by having a special boot loader in the MBR that checks for the 'access IBM' key to be pressed. If the key is pressed, it unhides the service partition by setting the partition type to FAT32 and boots it. If the key is not pressed, the service partition is hidden from windows by setting it to partition type 0x12 and afterwards the first partition is booted. The downside i see here is, that you have to rely on tools of the vendor which you can only guess how they work. The way it works with IBM hardware seems to be well-known, how it works on other hardware, one can only guess or search the web. Possibly if there is a designated key for some sort of rescue system on your laptop, the overall setup could be similar. I'm really wondering if one couldnt modify some open source boot loader (GRUB for example), to be self-contained with a configuration that has only two options: Wait for a special keycode and if that key is pressed, unhide (for example) the last partition on the drive and boot it. If the timeout is hit, boot the partition marked active. source: http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/Rescue_and_Recovery edit: so for embedding a configuration into grub, there is already a feature of it called 'preset menu' http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/gr...tml#Preset-Menu The only thing GRUB can't do at the moment seems to be the Hotkey thing.

yuo should have a look at BartPE and VistaPE. Both projects aim at generating a cd-bootable windows environment. (BartPE from XP files and VistaPE, obviously, from Vista). A DOS based bootdisk like the Windows 98 one stops helping you exactly the moment you have a ntfs drive (until you shell out money for a dos-ntfs driver).

you may want to use WireShark or another sniffer to trace down the reason for this. Probably there are just files missing or whatever. If there are logs of the TFTP-server they would probably help you, given the MS TFTP service produces usable logs. I for myself only use tftp-hpa and dnsmasq for pxebooting, never had the need for RIS/WDS.

If your WDS server is running in 'Legacy' or 'Mixed' mode, thus still supporting RIS setup types, you can get it to boot PXElinux. And with that and memdisk (also part of the syslinux utilities) you can boot almost everything. (and the joke is,that also includes WinPE V2.0) http://projectdream.org/wordpress/2007/04/...linux-from-ris/ http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php It's not the 'pure' and by MS intended way, but those who think out of the box, are sometimes wiser.

http://www.uawiki.org/doku.php?id=silent_a...s:installshield to use '/s' you first have to run the installation recording the answers to a .iss file with '/r'. Read the linked article for details.

well, at least the bug is known. why it isn't fixed by now, who knows. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg/+bug/9068 this should help you:

Um, sorry but am I the only one that doesn't find any hint about compatibility of the VirtualBox hdd image with the format VMware uses? edit: oops, after reading the manual i found the part where it says one can use VMDK files.

And I'm just wondering what you are asking for? Fileserver, Terminalserver, Automated Installations ... There are lots of options, but I don't really understand your question.

If you really want to install XP through Windows PE 2.0 as wim image, the best idea for the moment is to write a script around diskpart, imagex and bootsect. But that wouldnt allow to much variance, as I have problems with reading the diskpart output (not to mention imagex) from within Autoit (just as example). Just make a sysprepped XP, image it to a wim and then automate the tools within a WinPE built from the WAIK.