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Inside Vista's Image-Based Install Process
KrispyGlider writes "Vista's installation process is dramatically different from any previous version of Windows: rather than being an 'installer,' the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC. It is hardware agnostic, so it can adjust to different systems, and you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install. APCMag.com has published an interview with a Microsoft Australia tech specialist on the inner workings of it as well as a story that looks at some of the pros and cons of image-based installs."
This reminds me of other Microsoft installs I've done over the years, and it smacks of such disdain for the rest of the OS universe. Nowhere in the article, nor can I find evidence anywhere else is there an accomodation for an install where XP is just another OS. I remember my first experience with this, when I installed a Win98 on a linux box, and not only did Win98 not offer a dual boot, it (seemingly) gladly removed my linux MBR and formatted my partition without asking if it was okay, and without saying it had done so. That was quite a surprise.
Does anyone know if there is a way to do this? (Though, knowing XP can point to more than one OS to boot, I'm guessing Microsoft is more gentle if there is a pre-existing Windows OS there.)
I've googled for dual boot information, it looks to be similar to what I already know -- it's easier to set up a dual boot machine on a pre-existing Windows machine.
Hopefully this'll mean Windows may actually be able to deal with changing mainboard & cpu without freaking out and throwing its toys out of the pram.
XP takes a swift nose-dive for me when I upgrade my core components; it makes upgrading an even more painful process. As for Linux, I've yet to test this, but I gather it responds much better than XP to new hardware?
throw new NoSignatureException();
Souds like Microsoft knows how to deal with the advantages people can mention about Linux. It's getting annoying to hear "well.. vista will have it" each time you try to name another advantage of MacOS or Linux.
The best way to accelerate a windows server is by 9.81 m/s2
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
Still, anything that makes installs easier is probably a good thing, at least to the average user.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem
Does this make it install faster? How is it different from copying files? Going of on a rant, why are current installers so bloated? InstallShield is like 2 MB in itself, and MSI takes ages to install something. The only good installer I've seen is NSIS (and it's VERY good), it's like 30 KB, copies your files/makes whatever changes you want and that's it.
What do other installers do that make them take hours to finish?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
My geek karma must be off today. When I read the title, instead of thinking CD image, I thought "what, is windows going to just be a bunch of pictures of guys pointing and clicking with no actual instructions like an IKEA assembly manual"?
Anywho, this is a cool idea and it's begging for someone to create a "Vista Live" hack, much like the current *nix live CD's (Knoppix anyone?).
Yeah, it's Monday.
Sounds like it might be trivial to make a nice little boot disc for Vista, in this case.
Argh.
So then, if an image install is so different from a regular install procedure, what is a regular install procedure? How different is an installation from copying a bunch of files?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
However, all this is about to change. Windows Vista is based entirely around Microsoft's Windows Imaging Format (or WIM), a file-based imaging standard rather than a sector-based. this means that the image isn't a bit-for-bit image of your disk layout, and hence you can apply the image to a new system without destroying the contents of the hard drive.
Wow how revolutionary.
Oh, hang on a second while I untar this archive....
Vista's released, won't DVDs be obsolete anyway?
Maybe they can put both Vista and Duke Nuke Em 3D on the same HD-DVD/BluRay disc when they're released in a few years.
Some say Vista's image is tarnished, but I think we should wait until the next Apple commercial to see if it really works or not.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
> Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
In logical terms this is a fallacy known as an Appeal to Common Practice.
If Linux distros can do it then Windows should be able to do it and should actually do it. What if I want to run Windows 2003 server and XP on the same box for testing purposes?
The final linked article starts with this dubious sounding statement:
... The Vista install DVD is, in fact, just one big system image.
The bottom is about to fall out of the market for imaging tools like Symantec Ghost
But then immediately contradicts itself by pointing out:
But this flexibility only extends to the installation of Windows itself. To clone a full system with apps installed, Symantec Ghost or a similar utility must be used to create that image.
People don't use Ghost to make a copy of an unconfigured fresh install of Windows, they configure it first, then Ghost it. This new installer will have no effect whatsoever on sales of Ghost, or any other imaging software. After such a terrible start to the article, I'm not sure it's even worth reading the rest.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
"Virtualization"
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Yeah.. And by the time Vista will be released, we will have 100 GB DVDs to accomodate it.
hilarious
I feel allow duel boot is a good house guest option. People took the effort to purchase your program, and take time to install it. It would be nice if it didn't kill what you already had installed. Microsoft doesn't need to make it a default but an option, I would love it if Install had a checkbox marked Overwrite Boot sector. If it detects more then 1 partition.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...with an article on Slashdot devoted to its installer.
So is this revolutionary install concept an exact copy of what we see in Ubuntu?
Sounds like you'll need a www connection to install everything not in the image (drivers, etc). Just a guess :-)
I'm sure the idea goes back even further in time but I still find it interesting to see that the technique taken by knoppix, embraced by Kanotix and finally mimiced by Ubuntu is now being used by MS. The question is will you be able to carry around these vista images as a live system taking advantage of it's hardware detection to run your own copy of windows on any machine (real or virtual)? If not officially, will someone be able to produce a neat hack to do it? I would have thought everyone would like to have their own liveDVD of their system, featuring all the stuff they wanted installed and all their settings.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Three ways of doing this come to mind. Take your pick:
- Synergy (more or less a software KVM, minus the V)
- QEMU (processor emulator, similar to VMware, but Free Software)
- Hardware KVM switch
If linux has drivers for your hardware compiled in or availiable as modules it can try to autoload them. I don't understand what everybody else is talking about, WTF is "Kudzu" when it's at home? I've also never heard of compiling X into a kernel, however if you swap brands of gfx card (or upgrade linux) you'll need to (re)install the appropriate kernel blob for your card. Most linux and BSD distros ship scripts to autoconfigure their windowing systems.
This is vaguely interesting, I suppose, but I'd much rather see an image-based boot sequence. It should be much faster to copy 100 meg or so of stuff to RAM that to actually wait for all the programs to start up. You'd only need to do the real boot process after installing something, and make a new image before handing control to the user.
I'd love to spend a week -emerge(ing) a Vista designed specifically for my computer.
MS is just anticipating virtual rootkits. Having an image to compare to the installed system will provide a check of subverted files etc.
If this is basically going to just decompress windows onto your drive, where do the install options come in to play?
<sarcasm>
Perhaps they will be automatically detected/deduced for you by the same infallable logic engine we have come to know and love from the 'Windows Genuine Advantage' pirate software detector thus rendering manual configuration unnecessary in which case the manual configuration utility may well have been removed from Windows Vista.
</sarcasm>
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
Rather than go on about the many diverse users who make up that 99% you could have just said cattle, because this is what they mostly are. All in the same herd which doesn't care about custom installs or dual boots. Most of this herd just expect a computer in front of them to turn on and look and behave in a certain, very non-confusing (yeah, I know there's a tonne of irony there, but we'll leave it for now) manner. Someone else, the vendor or a tech weasel, installs the OS for them and defaults all the fiddly bits.
Given the opportunity to perfom an OS install most of the herd would panic and stampede towards calling Microsoft Support or the nearest suspected tech savvy person they know and plead with them to do it for them. As they just don't know or ever want to know how much disk space they would like for a primary partition or what SWAP is all about.
Perhaps image based install is the little bit of hand holding the more adventurous could cope with, but in the event it still is too much for their faint hearts, leave your phone off the hook for the next 3 years.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Major hardware vendors have been doing this with Microsoft OS's for years. HP has their smart start CDs that come with server rigs, and their restore disks that come with workstations that are all based off of the Unattended install principle. Other major vendors (dell, gateway) are no exception. It seems pretty much everybody who deals with thousands of systems knows and uses this capability. The article is just a dog and pony show, touting how wonderful it's going to be now that Microsoft is the gatekeeper of unattended installs. This stuff dates back to win2k, and probably earlier. Ok, so the HAL is no longer an issue for people who liked to goober things with hardware specific images. From the sound of it, the option of a hardware specific image is gone, so the Pro is we lose features?
Oh wait, it looks like the *biggest* change is that unattended.txt (the configuration file for automated installs) is now unattended.xml. Other good ideas used to further extend the Microsoft monopoly on your workstation environment include "binary based image format" (like people have had with ghost for years...)
I've still failed to realise why this would be interesting to someone other than people who work in IT, and even then it fails to be more than a footnote to the vista image deployment gotchas.
Has anyone else tried using ghost with vista? I did an experiment this morning where I created a ghost image of a vista box and tried to restore it on another, identical computer. Vista wouldn't boot; it said that the selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt. Booting from the install cd and selecting repair fixed it though.
Haven't had a chance to google this yet, so it may be a known bug.
IMHO Imaging an OS install is a good thing.
The mother of all windows, Smalltalk, Did just this.
And when you where finished for the day ST did
a sort of core dump to disk. When you want to
start up it restored your workspace just where you left off.
Emacs was so slow to load all of its lisp macros
the authors did the same thing dumping the core
image into an a.out file and starting that each time.
Perhaps You think Imaging a disk is different.
But I propose that its just the same thing as a different
level of the memory hierarchy. You just install into
a 800meg partition and dump to CD. same thing.
Make it bootable, add a start up that rus the installer
and copy it to disk.
Once MS has to patch the system, you lose your reference.
Or is Vista so good that MS won't have to patch it anymore?
Remember when DOS used to install into ONE arbitrary directory, and put a 3 or 4 files in the root of the drive? Reinstalling dos, or installing multiple OSes was as simple as having two dos directories. Multiple versions could be installed that way, also, although there could only be one set of boot files in the root of the active partition...although I'm sure the Windows way is necessary with all the new hardware, DOS did run on multiple hardware platforms, and was easy to install...I wish more software installed into one directory, and kept all its data files in its directory too...then installing windows & linux would be as simple as putting windows in c:\win and linux in c:\lin, and some kind of program to swap the root files when the system boots...(a bootloader?) Yeah, okay, so the partitions (harddisk bit layouts) are incompatable, so I guess this may be kind of a pointless post...
OK...does that mean that Vista will be unsure as to whether my hardware exists or not? Hmm... "VISTA HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION... actually is it illegal? who says what is legal or not? Perhaps it is legal for me but not for you? sorry, WINDOWS DOES NOT BELIEVE YOUR HARDWARE EXISTS. CONVINCE ME YOUR HARDWARE IS THERE, AND ILL LET YOU INTO YOUR COMPUTER" I think I would prefer "hardware fanaticism" personally. -JWR
-JWR
When I boot from a live Knoppix CD there is nothing in the GUI that would allow me to install it. It would be lovely if I could check that my hardware is supported and choose something in a GUI that would reboot into the installer.
Is there some fundamental reason this is impossible or am I simply a moron fo not finding the right command?
(I'm sitting next to a windows machine running PXE and the system just rebooted into the installer as I'm typing this).
He mentioned corrupt boot sectors (no boot sectors or boot sector virus), but primarily emphasized the user freindliness for those users who try to install/upgrade. He also mentioned that it wasn't possible for MS to code for every single "foreign" boot sector out there.
Prove it.
Most Linux distros (actually BSD flavors too) install the base system this way. it's just an archive (deb,tgz,etc) of the base system that gets expanded and is fairly hardware agnostic. Gentoo is entirely this way (you get a tgz which you manually decompress onto a formatted partition).
It is a heck of a lot easier to order data for efficient access on CD/DVD media when you have just on big file you read sequentially and dump to disk, than hundreds of files that you might have to seek to in some installer specific arbitrary order.
This might not be a bad idea for Ubuntu to follow, preinstall ubuntu and dump it straight to disk. Then unintall any packages you don't want. I'm assuming when you install a fresh system you have at least 1gb of overhead on the disk, normally people wouldn't install a new OS and completely fill up the disk leaving no space for real files.
I kind of wish Mac OS X would install faster, and that I wouldn't forget to click on "options..." to disable all the junk I don't need. (like 1gb+ of printer drivers)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Big picture, Windows has always used two different methods of referencing hardware. Relative like these generic examples: /dev/soundcard, /dev/network_card /dev/soundcard/sblive_in_pci_slot1_of_ASUS_REV2_MB , /dev/network/embedded_intel_chipset_with_this_PCI_ ID
/dev/eth0 to new /dev/eth0 but your DHCP server config for that new card will.
and very specific "locations" like:
When you switch things around, some will pick up where the other hardware left off and some does not. Even with the hardware swapout, some parts of the OS may pickup, and other do not. Your firewall and IP settings for your new network card will not transfer over from old
All hardware referenced relatively sure seems like the way to go but obviously there must be disadvantages, I just do not know what they are.
It was 17GB when I built a vmware image on beta2 up.
I couldn't believe they'd managed to get so much into one DVD, but somehow they did. And then come the security patches which you need to pull down from the net.
As a contrast, go to Instalinux, at www.instalinux.com , and create your own OS image through a web form. 5 minutes work, download time restricted to what you ask for.
"in site" - Was that pun intended?
What if you want to set up a QA machine to test software and configurations? Why should you have to run one machine per OS? One of the hardest problems I have seen with Windows is how to test your software under various configurations without having to support a large number of machines. The costs can eat you up alive.
Much better to multiboot one machine.
Why not use VMs?
1) Perfomrnace testing
2) If your app touches hardware in any way, you need to know that the configurations you have will play nice with various versions of drivers and hardware configs. There is simply no way to test hardware via VMs.
This is yet another reason MS centric development is horribly expensive.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I know. I'll just wait for Microsoft to give credit-where-credit-is-due. They'll do that. They're fair. They respect other people's ideas. I'll just wait.
Waiting...
.
.
.
.
.
.
Still waiting.
Sigh!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I'm partly responsible for an image that goes on around 5-600 machines at a Midwestern University College lab. We tried RIS when it was out, but althought it was cool, it was simply not practical. The savings of having 'one' image really didn't outweigh the impracticality of it taking 2-3 hours per workstation per lab.
This is no different; currently it doesn't support multicasting and so although it's 'revolutionary' (read: RIS) it still doesn't beat the ability to push down and image to a workstation is less than 20 minutes...oops, did I say a workstation, I meant a lab.
It still won't beat Ghost any time soon, IMO.
It's not really "image based". It's just another file archiving system, with one big file full of many compressed files. Like "zip" files. This is mostly a hype phrase, because "Microsoft announces new, incompatible compressed file format" would sound so stupid.
There are true "image based" systems. QNX has one. A QNX image, containing the microkernel, the servers, and any desired application programs, can be built, burned into ROM, and executed from ROM. This is how embedded systems start up, from copiers to routers to car navigation systems. Vista isn't doing that.
You can (almost) with any KVM. You just need another computer. One is set up with Windows and the other with Linux (and Samba to share files). Boot both and switch between them using CTRL-CTRL-1 or CTRL-CTRL-2. It's what I do, so I can switch Windows, Linux and/or Mac, depending what is under my desk.
So the software is not sure if it believes in the existence of hardware? //BTW I think the submitter means "hardware independent".
I am not sure if I want an operating system with existential angst.
The truth is an offense, but not a sin.------R. N. Marley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My immediate query is how well will this work with Apple's BootCamp? Could this cripple / force a re - install of OS X on a BootCamp machine?
Could this be some shot across the bows of Apple? Windows ain't done, 'til OS X won't run?
Maybe I've just been sipping too much conspiracy Kool-aid...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not that they have to facilitate the use of other OS'es -- though it would generate good will -- it's that they absolutely should not hose another OS on install without at least a warning!
Damn it, one of the things that always annoys me about Windows is that it's NOT as simple as copying a bunch of files.
This is mostly due to their inane and out-dated drive lettering scheme.
In Linux (or any Unix), I can move my installed system to a different drive or partition just by copying it. I can install an entire system within a folder of another system. All I have to do is change my drive mounts, add some symlinks, or use chroot, and I can put the entire system anywhere and it's as if nothing changed.
When my Dad bought a new harddrive because his old one was dying, we tried in vain to copy his old system over to the new drive. First we tried imaging it using "dd" on a liveCD, but that didn't work. Then we tried making a new filesystem and using "cp" to just copy the whole thing. That didn't either. We didn't want to spend money on Norton Ghost, just for a one-time thing.. He ended up having to re-install and re-activate XP, re-install all his MS Office software he'd had some trouble with installing in the first place, and finally setting up a whole new system. Just because he wanted to replace his drive!
That, compared to the number of times I've moved my Linux system without a single hitch... I can't believe people put up with this crap. Now instead of keeping things simple, they're moving even FURTHER away from a file-based approach?
I thought Microsoft finnally caught up with a GUI installer for windows. ;)
"you can also install your own apps into it so that your Vista install becomes a full system image install." I am afraid that companies like Dell will be delivering a custom made Vista Install CD with all their crap on it, so it won't be possible to install a clean Vista anymore. I for one hope that these apps will be optional during an installation, otherwise I think a lot of people are going to be stuck with all that crap.
!!!!! "Hardware agnostic"? Umm, ya, sure. Does ANYONE believe that MS could actually do that? Perhaps a "safemode" without networking or anything unusual but only just perhaps.
I predict this will not work & will be trashed in favor of something that actually works!
Since you can get the source, compile, configure your kernel, then install the packages you want. Using a stage 3 install is optional. And ubuntu already does it. There is very little configuring at all for it.
The tar file format, like most unix things has undergone several revisions and branches. In POSIX.1, a new format, called the Pax Interchange Format, was created as a backwards compatible extention of the tar format, that allowed for storing of arbitrary metadata. How this metadata is used is naturally left up to the system's implementation of tar and pax. I don't know how widely these extentions are used. I know that in Mac OS 10.4, metadata including resource forks are supported, but I think they implemented them using thier normal flat-file hacks (._myfile holds metadata for myfile), and not the pax extentions. This man file has a little more information.
Seems like it would really be ground breaking if Vista would isolate the OS from the apps & data effectively enough that you could do a complete reinstall of the OS without having to reinstall your apps or data. I've attempted to do that with Linux, just by keeping stuff I add later out of the root partition, putting things in /usr/local/bin, ctc.., though I've had to keep up to date a script that I use which will reapply any OS tweaks I've added since install (mostly configuration adjustments). And in Linux, you have to keep every old version of every library you've ever linked with pretty much for ever anyway, in order to keep old apps working (or you could link everything static I suppose), so it's mostly possible to do this under Linux but it's by no means automatic.
If Vista could make that a no-brainer it would be at least one thing I can think of that might make me consider upgrading to it. That, and the ability to absolutely enforce a restricted input focus so apps or the OS absolutely cannot steal input focus away from you while you're typing, except for imminent crisis warnings which would be limited to immediate data loss-- system crashing, out of disk space, etc.. I'd pay extra $$$ for that last feature, on any OS...
"the install DVD is actually a preinstalled copy of Windows that simply gets decompressed onto your PC. "
Now all ms needs to do is add this audio track for pre-install playback:
"DANGER: Destructive and EXPLOSIVE decompression in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... PRE-EXISTING FILES... NUKED"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Depending on how you set up your system, the maximum file size in NTFS is either 18EB or 32*16EB.
NTFS is, was, and always has been a 64-bit file system -- 11 years and counting.
actually, TFA seems to indicate that the image is file-based and not a raw dump of drive data, so not that destructive.
I guess there's no chance of me to prevent things like MSN Messager from being installed and adding garbage to the registry. Instead, I'd have to find the cryptic run command to uninstall it, which still leaves the problem of extra crap in the registry.
I was confused by the title because Windows always installs whilst displaying pretty *images* in the background ...
But darth vader kicked obi wan's arse as well. The more apt comparision would be Vader vs. Wesley, which the Crusher boy wins handily due to his ability to freakin' step outside of time itself.
But i suppose you're right about one thing, SW with it's one good movie is superior to ST with it's zero good movies.
It is not however immediately clear which would represent MS in this little analogy however. For while the empire was widely regarded as institutionally evil, and pretty much was, the federation was also institutionally evil despite its outward appearance as a benign organisation.
Hibernation on machines with lots of memory takes forever, and it never works reliably (considering that most hardware isn't designed with power state friendly-ness in mind... laptops maybe, and even then thats not a given).
However, many VM systems are quite speedy and allow you to pause a Guest OS so it doesn't take any resources (essentially the same as hibernating, except the Guest doesn't explictly need to support it, and the hardware is virtual so power management isn't an issue).
I wonder if Xen or GSX Serer would allow you to suspend the primary guest while running within the secondary...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
One more thing
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Mac OS X gives you control over which packages get installed. You can leave out the language packs, throw in X11, etc. If the Vista install disk is just a big image, how do you control what gets installed?
I have a spring 2001 era HP laptop with Windows ME (the original) and windows 2000 (my dual boot OS)
why ? if you have a problem, like you accidentally delete a system file, you can reboot to the other os and fix it, sometimes, more easily then any other way.
I'm sure the mac zealots will pounce on this, but mac hardware is such a mix of god awfull and ok that they, are, so to speak, in glass houses
How about "exempli gratia" and "id est" ?
I had a look at the beta build 5112. WIM is by no means new. Both the technology and the name of the exe (XIMAGE), first made their debut with Compaq restore disks. The process is different to, say, GHOST, and is more akin to a giant RAR file or something. OS/2 has been doing something along the line with PACK and PACK2 files from way back. The two WIM files represent respectively, a version of WinPE, and the installation. With a slight edit of the WinPE, you can change the shell to cmd.exe, and add your own utilities to it. It then becomes a boot Windows diskette that lives in RAM. After WinPE boots, it runs its default shell, like the eCom station version, is setup. Unlike the OS/2 version [which is about 5 years old], you can't do anything other than install the OS. Oh, well, still 5 years behind the edge. What you can't do with WIM, is to install it from a different version of Windows. Basically, the setup does the rego check etc before it bothers to process the data .WIM.
It does "install" faster, largely because most of the files are in one archive. On the other hand, those of you who had to deal with a faulty file on a cdrom....
W
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I was suggesting that preexisting files "in the way" might get overwritten. Has anyone outside of ms actually tried this on a disk that has preexisting data? It could be not just a way of making installs faster, but some sly excuse to deter dual-booting.
So much for the person who decided my comment was overrated and stole a point from me...
(slash image word: misnomer)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I also like to think of "i.e." as "in effect" or "in essence." Not the exact meaning, but close enough to choose the right abbreviation.
On the other hand, I tend to remember the actual information better than mnemonics (I've actually found myself trying to reconstruct the standard mnemonics for, say, the names of the nine planets, or mathematical precedence), so maybe I'm not the best person to come up with one...
The maximum NTFS file size is actually 16TB, as MS has crippled it for some reason or other.
get a life
I don't allways have time to format html
funny? Not so much.
Um, I use RIS at work, and it doesn't take 2-3 hours per station. Heck, I did an install yesterday, and it took less than 30 minutes between hitting F12 during POST and logging in to Windows XP for the first time.
My specs: 100 megabit switched Ethernet. Client is a Dell OptiPlex 210L, 2.6 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HDD. Server is some Gateway big black box, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB IDE HDD, Windows Server 2000. I suppose if you're running on a 10 megabit repeater or a 386SX for a server or something like that, your time figure might make sense....
Now, it is very true that RIS lacks multicast, and multicast makes a huge difference when imaging more than one client at a time. But you specifically stated "per workstation per lab", which would mean one at a time, right?
Nitpickers, take note: RIS isn't Ghost. They're totally different in how they work. They have different pros and cons. I'm just disputing the parent's performance figures.
Note also that TFA is really describing something totally different from RIS. RIS is basically just the same old Windows unattended install, just adapted so it can be started from PXE and run entirelly over the network. TFA describes something more along the lines of OS installation by just unpacking an archive file (ZIP, TAR, WIM, whatever you want to call it).
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That's probably because you didn't read the instructions -- especially the big warning that it would do that, unless you choose option X.
I recently did a "repair" install on a Windows 2000 system. The system in question had Service Pack 4 installed, but of course the repair replaced everything with original distribution files. Not quite everything, though: it seemed to leave behind a few SP4-supplied drivers and libraries so that it just bluescreened on boot. I fixed it by booting in "Safe Mode" and running the SP4 installer to re-upgrade everything. Fun times.