The story of Unattended XP Install, MS-DOS Network Boot and DHCP

[Guest]

Hi all,

I have an intresting problem which I have been unable to resolve for a few
days now.

Heres the scenario:

I work for a School that has around 1500 workstations and have been toying
with the idea of having technicians do unattended installs of workstations.

This would be accomplished by having a DOS based floppy to boot onto the
network, get an IP via DHCP, Map a network drive to the distribution point
and install XP Pro SP2.

We have a DHCP server that is multi scoped ie: 3 scopes 192.168.10.x,
192.168.20.x, 192.168.30.x.

When the technician goes to the workstation we wish to install on the floppy
is inserted and at the point when it is time to get the IP from DHCP it times
out and cannot find the DHCP server. To ensure that a workstation is
allocated and IP within a set scope we set reservations within that scope
based on MAC address.

If I move to a single scope setup the installs work flawlessley, am i
missing something here becouse I can not work out why one works and the other
does not.

Going to a single scoped setup is not an option in this case due to the
setup of the network which was before my time.

 

[j9]

My MCP students do this quite a bit. I have them do it 1 of two ways...

1) Use a LanMan or Bart's Network boot disk to grab an IP from the DHCP
server (no special reservations or anything... just one of the workstation
IPs on the main scope), log in, map a drive to the share with the install,
and run the install with an UNATTEND.TXT file as part of the parameter.
This is reliant on the workstation being on the same side of the router as
the DHCP server.

2) Use a PXE-enabled NIC to discover a RIS server and having the RIS server
push out the correct install image. This is reliant on the workstation
being on the same side of the router as the DHCP server and the RIS server.