This situation is unique and does require some creative thinking/solution: I haven't figured it out yet, but hopefully with your help we'll get there.
Situation:
----------------------------
We have 200+ computers (I will refer to this as the "farm"). Users are only allowed access to the farm by network KVM. There is no physical access to the machines. The machines don't have floppy drives (and for the sake of argument) they don't have CDROM drives. They are configured to network boot; aka PXE boot.
The point of this question is to see how to partition and format a 40Gb drive with FAT32 -> then copy over windows xp install files to the local disk and start the unattended installation all without rebooting. By accomplishing this, this eliminates any requirements that the windows xp installation needs (i.e. the install disk, boot disk, etc).
Here's what I know:
----------------------------
The windows xp install already does this but only for drives =< 32Gb. It can delete, create and format the local disk with fat32 without having to reboot. Needless to say, this feature is already built into the NTFS option.
What I've been able to do
----------------------------
I've been able boot into a DOS environment and automatically partition the drive (fdisk). I can't seem to format the drive because the partition table has changed.
I'm looking for either A) away around this using other software (i.e. fdisk dirivetives, freedos, etc) as long as we don't have to reboot between the fdisk and format (fat32). or B) an idea on how to reread the partition table so format.com (or which ever) will format the drive.
Sounds like a wierd situation huh.. well it is!! Please don't be concerned with "why" I want to do with. I've been given the restrictions and design specifications and am trying to accomplish them. This isn't for anything illegal, it's actually for research that I'm working on in grad school for a project called "ISEAGE". Google it. Any questions/comment, I'd love to hear em.
-MrSharky
Situation:
----------------------------
We have 200+ computers (I will refer to this as the "farm"). Users are only allowed access to the farm by network KVM. There is no physical access to the machines. The machines don't have floppy drives (and for the sake of argument) they don't have CDROM drives. They are configured to network boot; aka PXE boot.
The point of this question is to see how to partition and format a 40Gb drive with FAT32 -> then copy over windows xp install files to the local disk and start the unattended installation all without rebooting. By accomplishing this, this eliminates any requirements that the windows xp installation needs (i.e. the install disk, boot disk, etc).
Here's what I know:
----------------------------
The windows xp install already does this but only for drives =< 32Gb. It can delete, create and format the local disk with fat32 without having to reboot. Needless to say, this feature is already built into the NTFS option.
What I've been able to do
----------------------------
I've been able boot into a DOS environment and automatically partition the drive (fdisk). I can't seem to format the drive because the partition table has changed.
I'm looking for either A) away around this using other software (i.e. fdisk dirivetives, freedos, etc) as long as we don't have to reboot between the fdisk and format (fat32). or B) an idea on how to reread the partition table so format.com (or which ever) will format the drive.
Sounds like a wierd situation huh.. well it is!! Please don't be concerned with "why" I want to do with. I've been given the restrictions and design specifications and am trying to accomplish them. This isn't for anything illegal, it's actually for research that I'm working on in grad school for a project called "ISEAGE". Google it. Any questions/comment, I'd love to hear em.
-MrSharky