RIPLing Windows: Some Technical Issues
From EDM2
Original Work by Micho Durdevich
Contents |
[edit] 1. Introduction
This article builds on the material presented in the previous notes. Here, our aim is to address certain important technical issues, naturally appearing in the study of diskless Windows workstations remote booting from OS/2 Warp Server.
We shall see:
- How to uniformize the client architecture, using only Microsoft redirection software (both 16-bit and 32-bit). This plays an important role in considerations involving various network protocols. In particular, it will be explained how to create a mini-registry file, suitable for DOS-mode networking. We also provide a "blueprint" mini-registry, suitable for editing and compiling...
- How to enable long filenames for RIPL workstations (the simplest method);
- A couple of tips and tricks, having an independent interest.
This article is organized as follows.
At first, we shall consider workstations starting from a local floppy disk, and explain how to set up the DOS-mode Microsoft networking. The most subtle part of this procedure consists in creating a mini-registry file which contains the appropriate network information. As we shall see, there is a funny way to trick the Setup program, to do the main job for us.
Next, we consider "true RIPL" workstations, booting from a virtual floppy disk image on the OS/2 Warp server. This requires a small modification of the "real boot floppy" configuration.
We shall then pass to issues involving networking and long filenames. Finally, in the last section some additional remarks and tricks are collected.
All considerations are applicable to both Win95 and Win98 RIPL configurations, except the method of tricking the Setup, which works only with Win95. The installation Setup of Win98 is designed from the ground up NOT to recognize remote-boot installations, as the whole Win98 is officially non-RIPLable at all!?!
[edit] 2. Using Microsoft 16-bit Redirection Software
[edit] Workstations Starting From a Local Floppy
Our main objective here is to make a bootable floppy disk, suitable for RIPL, containing the purely Microsoft redirection software. In other words, this software should be used to connect to the server and map network drives during the DOS boot phase.
The Microsoft version of NET.EXE requires a registry file to read the corresponding network information. Consequently, it is necessary to include a Registry file on the boot floppy. Having in mind that NET.EXE actually needs only a small part of the real Registry, we may create a special mini-registry file, just for this purpose. Of course, we could try to put the full system Registry on the boot flopy, but it is often too big to fit on a single floppy disk (together with other critical files).
In order to create the registry file, we can use the Win95 installation Setup.
(i) Copy the files (from Win95 CD for example)
|
DOSSETUP.BIN |
SETUP.EXE |
EXTRACT.EXE SMARTDRV.EXE SCANDISK.EXE |
into an appropriate directory on the server. These files are necessary for the
server-based Setup of Win95 to perform the client-specific operations.(ii) Set up a diskless RIPL DOS-requester (using IBM redirection software provided with Aurora) possessing a real floppy drive. More precisely, the machine should run Win95 in DOS mode. The client should also have a RAM-drive [C:] of say at least 8MB.
(iii) Enable a sharing alias for the above mentioned server directory.
(iv) From the client side, connect to the OS/2 Warp server, make the appropriate network drive identifications, then RPLTERM (to enable the real floppy drive) and execute
This will initiate the Windows installation Setup.
(v) Go through the "Installation Process" and choose minimal components without any special hardware selection (this is just to make the Setup happy, otherwise it could easily crash on any nonstandard point, as discussed in [2]).
If everything goes fine, at the end of the procedure you will be asked to insert a blank floppy in the client floppy disk drive. At this point, if you decide to proceed, you should make sure that a full Win95 installation media is available to the client. The setup will create a bootable floppy, containing Microsoft network software, other critical files, and--most important for us--a raw mini-registry SYSTEM.DAT!!!
Better yet, we can exit the Setup just before the step of creating the boot floppy (at the "Start Copying Files" screen). The mini-registry files will be in C:\WINDOWS directory (under names SYSTEM.NEW and USER.NEW, note that these files will be SHR). Using this, we can easily manually make the boot floppy. Before exiting the Setup, it is not a bad idea to make a backup copy of the temporary files folder. It contains various valuable files that could be useful in other experiments...
An interesting variation of this theme is to use workstations with a hard disk which will hold all client-related files (later on, we can easily move these files to a client location on the server). Client files will go to the C:\WINDOWS directory, and a copy of the boot floppy files would be saved in the SUBOOT subdirectory.
For this to work correctly, we should compose a MSBATCH.INF file containing the following instructions: HDBoot=0, RPLSetup=0, WorkstationSetup=1 and SaveSuBOOT=1 in [Network] section. The last instruction ensures that the boot floppy files are saved in the SUBOOT subdirectory of the main machine directory (C:\WINDOWS in our case).
In principle, we could have defined InstallDir (this [Setup] variable points to the machine-specific directory) as a network directory, however such configurations have problems with OS/2 Warp Server: in all my experiments the setup was crashing! A sample MSBATCH.INF is given in [2] and a detailed documentation on its structure can be found in [1]-Appendix D. The correct setup call remains the same
We should make several subtle adjustments to the boot floppy. At first, we should include the appropriate NIC-driver. Secondly, we should manually edit the PROTOCOL.INI file and introduce the appropriate lines in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and MSDOS.SYS (as explained below).
The raw mini-registry should be further edited (in order to be usable with your NIC-driver and NET.EXE). In order to do this, export it to a text file
edit the corresponding network sections, and then compile to create the new
mini-registry:Interestingly, the mini-registry created by the Setup contains mostly completely unnecessary entries. Funny enough, many of such entries deal with graphical interface... You can safely remove all of them, and keep only DOS/16-bit networking related stuff!
Alternatively, you can have a look at the following sample mini-registry file (suitable for machines with an IBM EtherJet PCI adapter). Before compiling, the file should be appropriately changed to reflect your configuration.
REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion] "SystemRoot"="C:\\WindowS" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup] "BootDir"="c:\\WINDOWS" "WinBootDir"="c:\\WINDOWS" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\WinBootDir] "DevDir"="c:\\windowS" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Network] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Network\Real Mode Net] "transport"="*netbeui,*nwlink,ndishlp.sys" "netcard"="ibmfe.dos" "LoadRMDrivers"=hex:00,00,00,00 "PreferredRedir"="VREDIR" "Transition"=hex:01 "StaticDrive"="C,s" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName] "ComputerName"="xochitl" [HKEY_USERS] [HKEY_USERS\.Default]
This registry file is intended for workstations having a RAM-drive [C:]. After creating the mini-registry, you should carefuly adjust the boot floppy. Make sure it contains the following files:
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SYSTEM.DAT | <td align="center">
PROTMAN.EXE
