Silent (unattended) Install

I've been tinkering with creating an unattended installation CD for my operating system, and one of the things that can be done with such a tool is automatic installation of service packs, hotfixes, drivers, and even other third-party programs. In effect, I can create a single CD that can put my computer back to right at any time, reinstalling all my chosen software.

Usually, such a tool is handy for system administrators who need to install the operating system on a large number of computers. In my case, I simply want to have a handy 'emergency reinstall disk' handy and pre-configured to match my hardware and personal preferences.

MUSHclient is one of the pieces of third-party software that I'd like to include, but to my knowledge there's no option for silently installing MUSHclient.

As far as MUSHclient registration goes, I'm guessing I can export MUSHclient's registry settings to a .reg file and have that imported after the silent install.

Basically, I'm guessing I just need a way to get the installation process to proceed without asking any questions or asking me to hit any keys to continue...

Is this possible, or something that could be added in a future version?

Considering the small number of requests I get for group licenses, the issue of doing silent batch installs has never really come up before.

However you are right that all of the general entries are in the Registry, including the registration code.

What I would do is an uninstall, then a re-install. Look in the Registry for the MUSHclient entries (should be easy to find), and save those (after tweaking any you want, like worlds to open at startup, and any other global options).

The other thing you would then need to do is just create the appropriate directory structure and put the files in them (eg. zipping up after an installation would achieve that).

Here's something to consider. Instead of having a silent reinstall for everything, you could use a utility such as Norton Ghost which basically takes an exact image of your computer and stores it. Then you can just restore your computer to *exactly* that image, without worrying if the installs worked or not.

This tool is also similarly used mainly by people who want to quickly distribute a configuration over a network of PCs... Norton Ghost can get its source file from a remote PC (the "ghost" machine.)

Only disadvantage is that you need to acquire the software, which means spending some money. Still, personally I would think that's a much better option than having to deal with reinstalling everything - which has no guarantee that things will reinstall as they were before. The ghost image, on the other hand, is an exact replica of the configuration. It doesn't actually install anything; it just does an exact copy of the computer's hard drive partitions.

If that is what you are trying to do, I do a similar thing without having to buy Ghost.

It relies in part on the fact that modern hard disks have so much extra capacity that you don't really (usually) need. eg. a 40 Gb disk is probably about 10 times as much as a normal installation requires.

What I have done is partition up the disk into the "normal" Windows partition, and an OpenBSD partition (at the back end).

Then booting the OpenBSD installation CDROM (the floppy would probably do, and is available for nothing from their site) gives me low-level access to the disks.

In brief, it looks like this:

1. Make mount points, mount Windows partition and backup partition ...
   
   

   
   mkdir /mnt/cdrive
   mkdir /mnt/backup
   mount /dev/wd0i /mnt/cdrive
   mount /dev/wd1p /mnt/backup
   

   
   
2. Backup C partition table
   
   

   
   cd /mnt/backup
   
   dd if=/dev/wd0c of=/mnt/backup/partition_wd0.img bs=512 count=63
   

   
   
3. Backup C drive, compress with gzip on-the-fly and save as wd0i.img.gz
   
   

   
   dd if=/dev/wd0i bs=32256 count=66554 | gzip | dd of=/mnt/backup/wd0i.img.gz
   

   
   

The exact figures (eg. number of blocks) are dependent on the way the disk is formatted. No doubt Ghost is simpler to use, but this isn't too hard to do once a month or so.

The advantage of this, is you can reverse the process to get the image back, and basically go back to a known good copy, with everything installed, the Registry correct (eg. all registration codes for MUSHclient, WinZip etc.), IP address set up, printers configured and so on.

To do a restore, you would do something like this:



This is reversing the direction of the copy, and doing gzip -d to decompress rather than compress.

Disclaimer

These figures are for my system only. You need to find your own block sizes (bs) and block counts (count) before using on your system.