[NorthWood]

As the topic says someone knows or have an idea on how to do so that it is possible to boot from an external USB hard drive and then start an unattended installation? It could be useful for many reasons but it seems (to me) hard to do, I already tried but without any success...Any idea? Comments?

[niceguy]

haven tried it on a usb hard disk .... did boot up on a usb thumdrive map to a share drive with os and installed from that location fully unattended. would think it should work just as well with usb hdd.

try this site
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

regards

[jaclaz]

@Northwood
As long as you motherboard's BIOS SUPPORTS booting from USB device, it will work.
Read this:
http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=14316&hl=


@niceguy
No, booting from USB MUST be supported in the motherboard BIOS, the site you linked has some info on accessing USB devices under DOS.

jaclaz

[muevelonyc]

As long as it's USB 2.0 you won't have an issue. I've done it on numerous USB keys and external USB drives to kick off unattended installations of XP. Trouble will hit you with USB 1-1.1 devices as when WinPE boots up, it'll reinitiate USB1 root controllers, and thus if the kernel is on there, it doesn't like that.

[NorthWood]

Ok, I've copied files form BartPe installation on my HDD removable, the whole folder i386 and I renamed as minint, i renamed setupldr.bin in ntldr and copied on the root together with ntdetect.com, now after some seconds I'm prompted by the following error: "INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 14". As you have already understood what I'm trying to achieve is to have a fully unattended setup starting from the USB HDD and (sigh!) this is not what I was expecting...surely I'm missing something and I'm wondering what, could advice?
Thanks for your patience, in the meantime I will search again on the forum.