Unattended installation

[clauder]

Hi,

I am trying to develop a procedure to perform an unattended installation; essentially I want to be able to have someone insert a USB stick, power up the machine and lets some scripts I embed in the image on the stick to perform the installation. The person would be non-technical and untrained so interaction is not possible nor desirable.

All the instructions I found so far are using an interactive GUI or a console, which is not Ok.

I am ok at using the initrd as the actual installed root FS, in fact, it is preferable. But I am open to option.

Grub is a necessity so I was thinking at simply duplicate what happens with the USB boot process but I fond little information for this. Any suggestions / pointers to detailed information?

[grandma]

This is the script I use which looks for an EMPTY drive. If there is any data on it - even one file or folder - even if empty - it ignores the drive. Otherwise it:

a) does a DD to wipe any prior file system
b) does an FDISK - type c and active (boots)
c) does a FAT32 format
d) copies menu.lst and grldr to root folder
e) creates a TCE folder, OPTIONAL, and all
other folders in the TCE folder, since my system
has SH scripts and CFG files - i.e. Firefox uses
prefs.js and user.js so it grabs those and others
and copies it all to the new drive.

I will post this summary first and add the script
in a second post.

Warning 1 - I am running an old TC 3x version
to run this script so odds are you will need to
change some things.

Warning 2 - When testing this initially (5 years ago)
a friend tried it on his Windows laptop and it
FAILED BADLY/CATASTROPHICALLY
by wiping out the C drive...his Windows
drive - and my friend still talks to me,
but I learned NOT to trust any script
without running it in DUMMY MODE (no writes)
until you're sure it works. Stupid me.

WARNING 3 - I am going to modify the script
a bit - and you will need to change some folders
so it can find whatever files you may want to
include- a simple cp -r command will get the
TCE folder easily enough but you may have others
like a DOCS folder etc.

[xor]

Link deleted because it has nothing to do with the topic.

Quote deleted because blindly quoting entire posts serves no purpose.

    [EDIT]: Removed irrelevant content.  Rich

[Rich]

Hi xor
Please stop posting links back to your topics in other members threads.

Please stop quoting entire posts.

If you wish to call attention to something specific you are responding to, you may quote that small section of a post.

Do not quote entire posts.