programmerbob

I'm a noob when it comes to pxe booting, and not sure what I'm doing wrong. I have a multicast windows deployment services image setup and listening. When I try to pxe boot, it just gets stuck doing dhcp, and then never finds the server. Does the server and target computer need to be on the same subnet to find each other? I don't have control over AD(I'm an OU administrator in a large college), so hopefully I don't need to set things there. I've never used pxe to deploy my images before though, so I might be missing something.

When the automatic windows updates run where to the files that are downloaded get stored temporarily? I have a number of computers that we will be visiting for a migration and need to have people install the windows patches. We don't currently have wsus, etc to help in this regard. I was thinking that if they are stored in a place that is readable that I could dump the files I already had downloaded from the msft site into a folder and have it install. Failing this is there a script that will allow me to just run the patches sequentially without integrating into an os?

I recently have gotten a Dell Dimension 9150(aka XPS 400), and I can't seem to get the drivers to work properly with an unattended installation(using WinPE).(it's a 80551 Pentium D 2.8) It will format the drive then when it gets to the point where the computer reboots, it passes the dell screens, it will give a black screen of death. P.s. I have added mass storage devices before using the drvinst.exe method and it has worked before. There are 4 settings in the dell bios-> RAID Autodetect/AHCI(the default) RAID Autodetect/ATA RAID on Combination(SATA/PATA) I don't particularly need RAID, so that's not an issue if I have to shut it off. Anyone have any luck with this sort of setup? I'm sure I'm doing something stupid though it's always that way it seems.

I have an automated office installation that works fine when I go and run it from the command line: setuppro.exe TRANSFORMS="officesetup.MST" /qb- But when I put it into runonceex.cmd during my unattended windows installation, it won't install office, it looks like it runs but does nothing. All my other applications are working fine. rem Office used ORK reg ADD %KEY%\010 /VE /D "Microsoft Office" /f reg ADD %KEY%\010 /V 1 /D "%systemdrive%\installs\office2003\setuppro.exe tranforms=\"officesetup.mst\"" /f