Installing Windows

You may well wonder why this would merit a blog post, especially from me. I've a habit of re-installing the OS on my systems about once a month. That's usually because I screw something up or install some weird bit of software that renders my system unusable.

But this post is not about that.

The observant reader may remember that I have a (now old) laptop - the eMachines M6805. It was a nice little thing too, in it's day, though now it would be considered mid-range at best. You may also remember that I had problems with the RAM (which I replaced) and the combo-drive. The RAM went due to overclocking it a bit more than it could stand... oh well.

The combo drive was another matter. When the RAM went, I installed Ubuntu on it instead of the XP-Home that was preinstalled. The plan was to use the restore DVD when I got more RAM, but after the RAM was installed I noticed the failed drive which means I can't use the restore DVD.

No problem, you'd say, boot off a USB stick. Unfortunately, the BIOS does not support that. There is a BIOS update which can fix this, but I need a working CD drive for that. Catch 22.

The next obvious thing is to boot off a network and use RIS to install Windows remotely. But it seems that for some strange reason I need to have a server version of Windows to be able to do that! A normal XP-pro machine does not have RIS capabilities.

Unless, of course, one is willing to delve into the ways of PXE and the remote boot mechanism. Which, of course, I was.

Turned out to be more complicated than I wished for, and I have spent more than 2 days trying out various stuff and running all around the web looking for answers. Fortunately, many people seem to have had the same problems that I faced. Unfortunately, I still don't have a working Windows laptop.

In any case, I thought it wise to write down some keywords so that if I ever face such a problem again, I will have some idea of how it was solved the first time around.

1. Obviously, the first thing to do is to enable network boot in the BIOS setup and set that as the first boot priority. You also need a network cable running between the two machines, heh.

2. Then you need 3 major things running on the server (i.e. the system from which you will retrieve the install files) - a DHCP server, a tftp server and a binl server. You could use tftpd32 for the first two. For the last one, you will need to get the ris-linux package and run the binl python script.

3. You may need updated NIC drivers for the target system. In my case the first problem I hit was that the default windows installation did not have the drivers for the laptop NIC. I used the ones that came with the restore DVD, but they DID NOT WORK either, it gave me weird problems with blue screens during install. I downloaded the newer drivers from Via's site and they seem to work.

4. Set up tftpd32 as a DHCP server, pretty straightforward.

5. Set up tftpd32 as a tftp server, this is also easy enough. You may want to use syslinux as the kernel, there is documentation on how to do this.

6. You need a windows install, grab the i386 directory from your Windows CD.

7. Copy in the new network drivers into the i386 directory.

8. The binl server is supposed to provide these new drivers when queried, for that you need to create a driver cache by running the inf parser on the i386 directory, it should find the new drivers.


More later...