Ga22ar

GOOD LUCK...

Can't think of a way to impose a FAT parition onto a pre-existing NTFS only system without using a bootmanager of some description..

How many machines has this got to be used on ?

DrEvil

surely partition magic isn't that expensive to buy.. just a thought...

David_Wallis

Hi,

Has anybody worked out a way of doing a dual boot on windows nt, Drive C must be NTFS and has to be more than the 2gb limit..

I am wanting to do a dual boot to something such as free dos.. or dos 6.22 etc.

The file system needs to be either fat 16 or fat32 (accessible from dos)

I then need to be able to choose what os the machine boots with. from within NT.

Ill give you the background..

I have written a VBS script which queries SMS and SQL for a list of machines netbios names and IP Addresses... it then uses the magic packet util to wake these up.. I then want sms to go out and change the active partition or edit boot.ini to make the machine boot into the util on the dos partition. All utils or suggestions need to use freeware or shareware...

cant afford to buy software this is why we are trying to solve using scripting..

so no third party boot managers..

David

David_Wallis

about 4000

:-)

David

David_Wallis

about 4000

:-)

David

DrEvil

So, we are talking site license then!

AlexM

Hi,

You'll need two primary partitions, both within the first 8Gb of disk space.

Provided your NTFS partition is 6Gb or less you should be ok. Define both partitions as primary and set NTFS active. There are command line utils to set the active boot partition, but obviously only one is visible at a time..
There is a CL utility to set the active boot partition, but I can't remember the name of it.. what partition needs to be active when the machine is woken up?

This is do-able, but think very carefully if there is another way to achieve it - what needs to run in real mode?

Cheers,

Alex.

David_Wallis

Ok, Ill give you the full details..

My company use norton ghost v5 or something similar... We havent bought licences for v6 so we cannot use this (new multicast bits..)

Basically we have written a script to automatically rename the machine, ghost walk it (change sid) and then add it to the domain and then reboot.

Therefor all we do is stick a boot disk in and tell it the new computer name... all is copied to ram disk and we bugger off.. user can then use their machine in x amount of mins... and we are back at our desk on scooby net...

However I am wanting to basically setup a ghost multicast session on the server and then deploy a package to a collection in sms which would wake machine up if not on, write the name of the session into autoexec.bat and also write the computers name into autoexec.bat... it would then set the active partition to the other (dos)... and reboot the machine.

Thus when the machine reboots the following happens..

1) Dos partition is set to active so boots from this
2) Starts up Ghost and Connects to session name as specified by script from sms earlier.
3) Finishes ghost and runs ghostwalker knowing what its new computer name is, and gets new sid.
4) Automatically logs in using reg key autoadminlogin and uses netdom to create computer account in domain.
5) uses Shutdown.exe to do reboot... is now in domain, and ghost has only ghosted first partition... but also set it to active, so when reboots now they go straight into new build.

No visit required to desk.

From what I have seen if i create a second primary partition in disk administrator, and set this to active... then boot from a floppy and format this as usual, and then run sys...

I can then run debug with the script to create bootsect.dos and edit boot.ini but as it is outside the 2gb limit.. it doesnt boot.

Any ideas

David

simon_prickett

What we've done to get the boot partition above 2Gb before is put the drive to be installed on in another NT machine, and used disk administrator to format and partition it, then re-installed it in the original machine and installed NT from there.

You'll need SP4 or better on the machine that does the partitioning / formatting as otherwise it won't recognise large disks.

Hope this helps!

Simon.

father_jack

Last time I looked at this - we ended up using a Win 98 boot disk which gets you over the 2Gb DOS limit, but we couldn't get the rest of the unattended install stuff to fit on the disk. Maybe your setup will fit on 1 disk?
There is also a util called GDISK which replaces fdisk or course, but I'm too thick to make it work.
We're using partition magic atm.