Fredag 14 mars 2008 10:06, skrev William Cheng: > Dear all, > I have been using unattended for over one and a half year. Every > things works fine except broadcom NIC driver. > Recently we upgraded to unattended 4.7. > It still works very find, except in one model of our machines, > after the first reboot. It shows "NTLDR is missing. press any key to > restart". We don't have such problem for that machine with Unattended > 4.6(Using the same copy of I386 of Windows 2000 SP4). > The machine is a compaq EP series PIII desktop. (I think the model > should be CPQP733) (Please tell me if I should provide more detailed > information)
That sounds very familiar.. > I searched through the mailing list archive, it looks like most > post related to NTLDR is talking about 4.7 pre, and only appear on newer > machine, or machine using SATA, which doesn't looks like my case. > I have also try a few (not all, because some of them I really don't > know how to test) suggestion in the wiki. But none of them works for me. > Any one knows what the problem is? Or is it simply that my machine > it too old and no longer supported? Whats happen is that the newer kernels is using the libata drivers. So the kernel in 4.7 see the disks the same way as it sees sata disks. Because of that the logic in install.pl can not correct the disk geometry via the old PATA way thru the kernel. 4.6 fixed disk geometry on these machines, but 4.7 can no longer do that. All Machines that does not report 255 heads is affected (printed to the screen at unattended linuxboot) So its not just older Intelbased PATA machines, but also all thinkpads models and some HP laptops. I just write the disk geometry into the partition to fix this. A bit crude, but effective. A test ISO is posted here: http://www.source-exchange.de/unattended/nils/ Changes from stock CVS are: Disk geometry fixes - for the "ntldr not found" problem. An alternative windows installer - dosemu alternative. (Adapted from Marios unattended-gui) An option to run a system command after the dosemu/wininstaller run. install.pl will ask if you want to run the dosemu alternative (nt5x-install) or if you want to use the old dosemu. To get rid of the question put one of these in site/unattend.txt [_meta] section: ntinstall_cmd = "" # use old dosemu ntinstall_cmd = "nt5x-install" # use dosemu alternative (nt5x-install) Disk geometry fixes: Are as default added automatically. You can turn this off by adding these (both) in site/unattend.txt [_meta] section: fix_disk_geo_heads = "" fix_disk_geo_sectors = "" Run a system command before reboot (after windows installation): /c is mounted so you can copy files to it As an example; Put in site/unattend.txt [_meta] section: post_ntinstall_cmd = "cp -r /z/os/drivers/drivers /c/drivers" Im still using this build on production, and it is stable. (we have reinstalled about 30 thinkpad T61 the last two weeks..) These changes should be rolled back into the main unattended. With a updated kernel and the latest parted we should have a really good unattended linuxboot :-D I just have to find the time to update the patches.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list unattended-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
