Yes, it would be great to see what you have done. I haven't tried to
image a Windows box via kickstart but I know it can be done. Sorry I
don't know much about the product we are using. I was just brought in to
write a boot image that calls a their program on an NFS partition. I can
find out though...
Philip Rowlands wrote:
On Sat, 4 Oct 2003, Patty O'Reilly wrote:
It's a product called PowerQuest which I know very little about. My boss
wants me to come up with a Linux boot disk so they can get away from
lanman authentication.
Umm, PowerQuest is a company, not a product. I've only used their
"Partition Magic" (which is quite good).
Darn, I forget the product name and I'm not at work to find it.
I think you could install Windows by using kickstart to create a DOS
filesystem and moving the necessary boot programs (command.com,
msdos.sys, io.sys), network drivers, autoexec.bat, config.sys, etc, to
the partition.
So far so good. Why network drivers? Most ship with Windows.
True, as long as the install files are local, you wouldn't need network
drivers.
You'd have to dd the the DOS boot sector to the first 512 bytes of the
disk.
Aha! Do you mean the master boot record, which contains the partition
table? Or the boot sector of the new partition? Will the partition have
the same disk geometry every time?
Hum, the machine will need to get rebooted and has to find the DOS
partition. I guess you could install lilo on the MBR and have it boot
DOS, then copy the Windows boot sector to the DOS partition. I've never
tried this.
Then copy the Windows installation files to the partition and run
setup.
Yep; that's my plan too, using answer/response/something files.
Back to my questions. Would my ks.cfg look something like this?
lang en_US
network --bootproto dhcp
nfs --server x.x.x.x --dir /redhat/PowerQuest
device ethernet
Is this a new one?
Yes.
keyboard us
%pre
/mnt/source/myscript.sh /proc/cmdline
And that's it?
Correct. Then in myscript.sh, partition the disk, copy the files, write
config.sys and autoexec.bat, and make it bootable (this is the hard
part).
Except I don't think this is necessary. I think once I hand control to
the PowerQuest app, it will take care of the rest. I'll let the list
know if it works.
Then, break out of kickstart to reboot the computer. I did this:
---------------
# don't install Redhat, but force reboot instead.
cd "$EXTRABIN"
cp umount reboot-now /tmp
cd /
/tmp/umount -l /mnt/source
sync;sync
# reboot-now makes a direct syscall to the kernel
/tmp/reboot-now
----------------
I did plan to open-source this - is it worth packaging up what I've
written so far (which is still incomplete)?
Cheers,
Phil
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