Winnt.exe Unattended Setup for 64-bit Server 2003.

I have an environment where I setup all my servers by PXE booting them in a
DOS environment and running winnt.exe from a remote server. I noticed that
winnt.exe is no longer available in the CD for Windows Server 2003 for 64bit
Extended Systems, only winnt32.exe is available. Does Microsoft no longer
support setting up the 64 Operating Systems from a dos environment? Is there
any kind of work around besides WinPE?

 

Short answer: Nope.

I have Win2k3 x64 installing over a network using PXE and WinPE. The
new version of Automated Deployment Services (ADS 1.1) will have the
ability to push WinPE over the ADS PXE.

I ran into the same problems you are facing now.

 

Thanks....are you currently using RIS?

 

No, We use ADS. We mainly deploy Windows Servers.

Jack

 

You can use RIS with your 64-bit systems, though. Both AMD64 and Itanium
will work with RIS.

 

Ok....since I was unable to find ADS 1.1, I tried the following.

I built a 64bit version of WinPE and installed it to the hard drive of my
destination computer using a DOS PXE boot environment. I also copied the
64bit Extended OS source files to the hard drive. I was able to boot WinPE,
but when I tried running Winnt32.exe, I got a pop up error "Out of Memory"
and setup exited.

Any thoughts?

 

How much RAM is in the BOX?

How big is your WinPE install in MBs?

Jack

 

The WinPE install is approximately 213MB, and with the OS source files I'm
using about 829MB of disk space. I put all this on a DVD and booted from the
DVD and the install runs with no problems. But if I install WinPE and the OS
source files to the hard drive and boot from the hard drive, networking will
not start and I get the "Out of Memory" error when I run winnt32.exe.

I have 1GB of memory installed.

Thanks for the input.

 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be any help.

We are using a Linux PXE system, from which we are booting WinPE
directly from PXE. When our WinPE boots up, it starts networking, maps
a drive, lets us make some choices for the OS, then starts a network
based install by calling winnt32.exe.

We experimented a little with PE on the HD. But went to network based
instead.

Maybe someone else can help.

Jack

 

With regards to you latest post, can you give me details on what Linux PXE
system you are using? I am using a Windows Server 2003 system with RIS
installed but not configured. This allows me to use PXELinux with TFTPD in
windows to serve my floppy boot images. However, I have not been able to
figure out a way to PXE boot with ISO images using this system. I only
installed WinPE to the hard drive because I couldn’t figure out how to PXE
boot to an ISO.

Any details you can share are very much appreciated.

 

I'm not a linux guy, but I asked around, and we use SysLinux which
comes with PXELinux as part of the distro.

Hope that helps.
Jack