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Installing windows remotely




Posted by aarong11, 08-20-2008, 04:06 PM
Hi, my current situation is that i'm currently renting out a server in a datacenter, and there is no realistic way I can get physical access. Call me cheap, but I really don't fancy shelling out $100 to get my techs to install it. I do have an idea though, and I just wanted to know how realistic it is / how I would go about performing it. My server has a rescue shell (uses busybox) that I am able to re-install the OS from (all linux OSes), re-partition the HDD and do general troubleshooting things from. If I was to create a VMware machine on my local computer, install windows 2003 and use a hdd image cloner (from within the machine) to create an image of the HDD, how would I go about copying this image to the server's HDD? I don't know of any cross platform "HDD backer upper / recoverer thingies" (don't know the proper name, sorry ), and it would be great if someone could help me out. Thanks!

Posted by TheITAdvisory, 08-20-2008, 04:30 PM
Hi, In theory, your Idea is good, however the windows OS will likely install drivers and such to the hardware specifics of the vmware machine. There is a way to do a remote install, using tftp, and all of that, it can be tricky for windows Here's a great article on how to do it, scroll near the bottom.

Posted by aarong11, 08-20-2008, 04:35 PM
Hi, thanks for the reply, but I can't seem to find that article you mentioned? Heh, sorry

Posted by TheITAdvisory, 08-20-2008, 04:36 PM
ohh, boooooo! It didn't post My apologies, let's try again http://systembash.com/content/unatte...linux-windows/

Posted by aarong11, 08-20-2008, 04:50 PM
Thanks for the reply, but i'm a little confused - would that work over the internet, or only over a local area network?

Posted by TheITAdvisory, 08-20-2008, 04:51 PM
This should work remotely.

Posted by fastdeploy, 08-20-2008, 05:25 PM
The suggested fix will not really work for your situation as, one, you need both a DHCP server configured to support PXE booting and, two, a TFTP server configured with the various boot disks required to remote install Windows. This kind of thing is non-trivial to setup. As you are renting a single server obviously you do not control the network and server infrastructure required on the backend to support these features. If the server had an internal private network interface with another server you were leasing in the DC you could setup this PXE/TFTP environment on your own. As for loading an image - not likely as the rescue environment is likely very small - a couple hundred megs, maybe - so there is probably no way to copy an image you may have created on a Windows VM unless they've given you a largeish data repository somewhere on the same network as the rescue environment. You could potentially create the Windows VM (or a physical Windows box) and boot it into the same kind of rescue environment, use the dd utility to create a disk image then copy the image over to your DC, but I suspect it would be very slow and may not work even if you did get a DD image. There are several Ghost-like binary imaging utilities available for Linux and they may even be available in your rescue environment so if you can approximately replicate the rescue environment at the DC that may possibly work - assuming, again, you can get the space at the DC to upload a binary image into a space that would be accessible by the DC's rescue environment. And of course you'd need to slipstream driver support for your physical DC server into your Windows image if you wanted the physical server to boot properly. The best solution really is for the DC to support remote and/or automated Windows OS installation solutions like RIS/WDS.



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