Hi Harry,
Windows has an "unattended install" method, where it reads
some configuration info from a file, and runs through the
entire installation process by itself, no user input is
required.
I have done this with windows 2000 but I think it can also
be done with win98. I beleieve there is a program that can
help you generate the unattended.txt file, which is a
configuration file. But I didn't even need to do that, I
found an unattend.txt file on the net and just used that.
The way it works (at least on windows 2000 it works this
way), is that you put the windows cd-rom in the drive,
and run one command from the DOS prompt. This command
will read the unattend.txt file, and it will look at the
hardware, then create a "temporary install disk". This is
basically a bunch of compressed installation files that
will be used for the installation. I was surprised to
find that windows 2000 only created 250MB of install files,
and this installs the entire windows 2000, which is about
1GB in size.
After the temporary files are created, all you do is
reboot and it proceeds to install the entire OS. This
gets tricky though, because there are lots of different
options you can use. You can force it to do an interactive
install (where it asks you questions like normal install)
or a totally unattended install. You can configure it to
partition the disk automatically or have it prompt for
those commands.
On my system, I saved the temporary install files and
compressed them into a single file. This makes it very
easy to reinstall windows at any time. I just copy that
250MB of temp install files to my disk, reboot, and
windows proceeds to install itself. I have mine set up
to prompt me for partitioning info, but this can be set
up to do that automatically.
It takes a while to figure all of this out, but I think
it's worth it. Being able to install windows in the full
attended mode sure is nice.
For more info on this, do some searches with the keywords
windows unattended install. There is lots of info on the
microsoft site, and on many other sites. I started out
with this info, because I wanted a dual boot windows and
linux system:
http://www.cs.rug.nl/~jurjen/linux_win2k_distribution_howto/
I followed those instructions, and I saved the windows
install files in a unix .img file. For me to reinstall
windows now, is as simple as copying that .img file
back onto the drive, rebooting, and that's all ... the
windows installation starts.
-- Doug
At 04:30 PM 4/19/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi all,
>Harry here, and this talk on guispeak about reformatting hard drives
>brings something to my mind which I've ben wondering about for a long time.
>Here goes the situation. Let's say I have a computer that's using windows
>98SE, and I want to reinstall it cause there are errors or because it has
>crashed. Can a blind person do their own install? How do I do it step by
>step, please? Never done this before, so walk me through this step by
>step. I have a friends machine, a 300 meg machine using windows 98 first
>edition and it's got all kinds of problems on it. It keeps saying table
>is busy, and it also keeps saying cannot perform this operation on a
>closed data set. How do I get rid of this error? Also, how do I do it if
>I wanted to reformat her hard drive and make a new install of windows 98SE?
>take care,
>Harry
>
>
>VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
>To join or leave the list, send a message to
>[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
>"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
> VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
>http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
|