[techtalk] dual boot/ linux writing into win98 partition

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 03:34:52PM -0600 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Vinnie thought:
> On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, Terry Yesse wrote:
> 
> 
> something similiar I've done, that might work well in your environment, is
> put the windows cab files out on a shared drive then booted linux, mounted
> the shared rive and copied the files over to a windows-formatted drive,
> then used the windows install scripting option (I don't remember what it's
> called...check your docs..if you can't find anything tell me and I'll go
> see what I can dig up) to install windows...it's reasonably fast and
> requires minimum human intervention...

It's called something like batch95 or batch98 IIRC and generates an
msbatch.inf which can be automated right down to including a license
code and installing network printers.  You still need to sit through the
driver installation (5 reboots just to get a video card working!) bit
though.  

I'd prefer a setup where a generic drive is imaged with dd while a backup
of machine specific files (system.dat for the registry and the likes of
autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini and system.ini).  Restoring a machine
would be as simple as using dd to restore the disk and then copying back
the machine specific files.

I have a suspicion that I heard somewhere that dd could not be used to
image from one disk type to another (something about the low-level disk
geometry or something) but I'm not sure really.
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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