Here is my end goal: PXE boot image used to automate Windows OS installs (2000, 2000 AS, XP, 2003 EE, 2003 Std, 2003 EE R2... etc) on various servers My problem: mass storage support and network drivers... for all of those OS'es, and how to build my own custom boot CD that will take care of all that... I'm seeking some advice on what the best route to do this would be. And my budget is all of $0... Have a PXE server already setup, it's a RHEL box which is doing DHCP and TFTP.. The problem which I've not found a great, simple, easy solution to is how to build a small boot image to take care of all of this... my intial thoughts were to do the following 1 - Custom PE image (BartPE / WinPE / whatever) to PXE boot, include network and mass storage support on this image 2 - After booted, format hard drive and mount network share with all the OS install directories 3 - Copy contents from directory onto local drive 4 - Launch unattended install on local drive I think I can handle steps 2-4 without much problem, I've been using custom nLite CD's to do unattended installs where I just pop the CD in the server and go away. I don't see it being much of a problem to copy the contents of my nLite CD's over the network and launching the installers. But, I'm having issues with the step 1. The way I created my nLite CDs with all the drivers I needed was simply cheating. Most of the servers I'm dealing with are IBM servers and blades, which they include all their drivers on their IBM ServerGuide CD. They put them in the $OEM$\$1 and textmode format, so I just add them with nLite and tell nLite which are the regular drivers, and which are textmode. I'm hoping there's some way I can do something similar for creating the custom PE image. I'm not able to use BartPE to create a stripped down PE from those nLite CDs... I get errors when I build it about missing .SYS files for the drivers, and if I go ahead and build the ISO I get missing files when it boots that ISO. The IBM ServerGuide CD does have a WinPEx86.zip (and x64.zip) folder on it, and my guess is that it might contain the drivers and everything for me? But I can't figure out for the life of me how to use that zip file to get a bootable PE image... The contents of it are (130MB): Fonts\ help\ inf\ msagent\ Registration\ system32\ WinSxS\ biosinfo.inf bootfix.bin ntdetect.com setupldr.bin setupldr.exe startrom.com txtsetup.sif If somebody could give me some guidance as to how to take that and make it into a bootable PE image, or a simple way to take those driver folders and create my own custom PE CD using any flavor of tool (WinBuilder, BartPE, PicoXP, etc etc etc) I'm open to ideas... Thanks in advance! (I hope)
