RDP & legacy OS support?

[Alastair Harrison]

We still have many customers who require the installation of legacy Operating Systems such as Windows 2000 particularly on to VMware servers. I realise the official docs state RDP 6.0 doesn't support W2K but could any one let me know if there is a work around to support this?

RDP 3.83 had a Virtual Deployment Tool Box that included support for W2K.

We still need this.

[Adrian Clint]

Have you tried running just the PIM (Proliant Integration Module) from the older RDP media and just selecting the Windows2000 OS's you want to add?

[Alastair Harrison]

I haven't tried that because the official HP Knowledge Base states that support was dropped due to WinPE, see below.

I know I can create a DOS job to deploy W2K but won't all the scripts that are called fail as RDP 6 won't have or recognise them?

" Article: 188

Applies to: Releases 3.80 through 3.83

In 3.80, RDP has dropped support for Windows 2000. Once you upgrade to 3.80, all Windows 2000 jobs, while still present in the console, will no longer function. The Windows 2000 setup program does not work under the new WinPE 2.1 automation environment."

[Adrian Clint]

Ok I forgot about that advisory. But I still think the scripts may be tweakable to work. But it would be too hard to try when not having an RDP system in front of me.

Do they have to be scripted installs?

Why not manually build a 2K image on a VM with an Altiris Agent installed, sysprep it and then capture an image of it.
Then just deploy the image to new VMs.
You would need an Altiris Server Agent license for each VM though.
Once you have an OS with a licensed Agent you can run your own defined scripts on this to do any custom work.

[Alastair Harrison]

Thanks to a colleague & with a bit of tweaking I have successfully managed to create a scripted installation job to deploy Windows 2000 using RDP 6 with DOS as the default PXE boot environment. You'll need to select F8 at boot to select a DOS boot as RDP 6 does not support DOS by default.

Job properties:-
Distribute Disk Image - FAT32.img
Power Control - Reboot
Run script - Make bootable partition/copy files
Power Control - reboot
Details of script:-
rem Make Bootable Partition and copy Installation files
rem bootwork unload

a:
f:\Bootwiz\platfo~1\dos\MsDos\OS\sys.com f:\Bootwiz\platfo~1\dos\MsDos\OS\ c:
f:
copy f:\Bootwiz\platfo~1\dos\MsDos\OS\himem.sys c:\
copy f:\Bootwiz\platfo~1\dos\MsDos\OS\smartdrv.exe c:\
echo device=c:\himem.sys>>c:\config.sys
echo @echo on>>c:\autoexec.bat
echo c:\smartdrv.exe >>c:\autoexec.bat
echo c:\i386\winnt.exe /u:c:\default.txt /s:c:\i386 >>c:\autoexec.bat
echo c:\smartdrv.exe >>c:\autoexec.bat
md c:\altiris
copy f:\lib\osdist\w2k\aclient.exe c:\altiris
copy f:\lib\osdist\w2k\aclient.inp c:\altiris
copy f:\lib\osdist\w2k\runonce.cmd c:\altiris
md c:\i386
c:\smartdrv.exe /u /v
xcopy f:\lib\osdist\w2k\i386\*.* /e /s c:\i386
copy f:\lib\osdist\w2k\default.txt c:\

Make sure aclient.exe, aclient.inp & runonce.cmd are copied in to the W2K folder on the Deployment Server.

runonce.cmd should have the following command
"c:\pathto\aclient.exe c:\pathto\aclient.inp -install -silent"

[Alastair Harrison]

If someone can let me know the solution to creating a scripted installation of Windows 2000 to a physical server I would be very grateful.

Regards

Al