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Unusual Installation


remush

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Hi all,

I'm setting up 20 computers just donated by a local school to go to the solomon islands to a new hospital and school being built their by ADRA.

I find myself in an unusual xp installation situation.

The computers do not have any cd/dvd drives, they support sata drives ONLY and I only have ata/ide cd/dvd drives in the building.

I've read about how to create a bootable usb drive that will install xp, but its not very efficient, i'd have to leave the flash drive in until xp was installed. I only have 2 flash drives and 20 computers to setup :)

Any suggestions ?

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Any suggestions ?

Obvious reply :

  • Buy several SATA CD drives.
  • Buy several USB sticks.
  • Buy several bidirectional SATA TO IDE converters
  • Buy several USB to IDE converters.
  • Buy several USB sticks.

All the rest would be a miracle. :w00t:

How long do you estimate will be install time from USB (provided that the PC's are USB 2.0 compatible) (plain install, fully attended) on 20 PC's?

You can make a PE on the stick and run WINNT32 on each PC, to install from local source, then you take the USB stick with you while the XP from the internal hard disk installs itself.

To do this you will need to have:

  1. a "universal source" (provided that the 20 Pc's are not identical
  2. a "fully unattended" setting
  3. testing the above (attended) on at least on PC per type
  4. correct problems and loop to #1 or #2 n times

Or you can make a sysprepped "generalized" install image and depoy to each PC. (and again you will have to loop through troubleshooting).

Or if the PC's are all the same or no more than two or three "groups" you may want to make a few attended installs and then clone the drives....

How long will it take? :unsure:

We are talking of 20 PC's, not 200 or 2,000 .....

jaclaz

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