Unattended clean install

[Frank]

I'm studying for the MCSE 70-270 exam, so my question is hypothetical. Say
someone wants to do a clean install on 3 computers with different HALs;
otherwise identical. He needs to get a partition formatted, but not the
whole drive in one partition. It seems reasonable to boot from the Windows
CD and go through NTFS format, etc. But then there appears to be no way to
introduce the winnt.sif file. If he installed any lesser OS on the hard
drive to format and accept a Read: winnt32 command with switches, then
install would treat it as an upgrade, right? I suppose he could do it with
MS-DOS with CD drivers on floppies. Either way he'd have to start with FAT
or FAT32; convert to NTFS later, and maybe expand the partition. Any
approach I can think of sounds messy. How do people generally handle this
situation?

 

[george]

I'm studying for the MCSE 70-270 exam, so my question is hypothetical.
Say someone wants to do a clean install on 3 computers with different
HALs; otherwise identical. He needs to get a partition formatted, but not
the whole drive in one partition. It seems reasonable to boot from the
Windows CD and go through NTFS format, etc. But then there appears to be
no way to introduce the winnt.sif file. If he installed any lesser OS on
the hard drive to format and accept a Read: winnt32 command with switches,
then install would treat it as an upgrade, right? I suppose he could do
it with MS-DOS with CD drivers on floppies. Either way he'd have to start
with FAT or FAT32; convert to NTFS later, and maybe expand the partition.
Any approach I can think of sounds messy. How do people generally handle
this situation?

They manually install a machine the way they want it to be and then take an
image of the disk (Ghost or the like) to deploy onto other machines. If they
have different hardware they might do this for each type of mobo they have
(ACPI, Standard-PC, etc.)
If they have not many machines they might even decide not to bother and just
do the manual thing, possibly from a slipstreamed and 'driver-updated' newly
burned CD.
They might also decide to use RIS (given enough network bandwidth to support
it)

george

 

[Frank]

Thanks, George! You seem to have had a lot of exposure to the real world,
big IT envoronment.