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OS Installation is possible thru AMT ?

ravi
Beginner
1,316 Views
Hi,

1 . Is it possible OS installation with AMT for fresh system/hard disk.
if it is possible , how we can supply/enter the License key.
with SOL / IDER features.

2. Is it possible to copy the image of hard-disk to new hard disk,
with SOL / IDER cd-image boot concept.

help on this would be grate.

Thanks & Regards,
Ravi
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4 Replies
Ajith_I_Intel
Employee
1,316 Views

Hi Ravi,

Intel AMTallows the console redirection through SOL feature and boot redirection through IDE-R feature. As you know, SOL can only do text based redirection. It is your responsibility to come up with creative images that can accomplish your goals.

You can come up with an image that you can redirect AMT to, and this image can pull all the needed files off the network for a fresh installation on a system. The same concept applies for extracting the image from the existing disk and copy the image to a new hard disk.

Hope this helps.

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milan
Beginner
1,317 Views
Hi Ravi,

This is what i do so i might be able to help to a certain extent, I acctualy setup new computers remotley and reload ones that need it.

We have recently looked at deployment options and tried a couple but we are not a big company and only manage about 150ish computers and i haven't been happy enough with some deployment options for us to go out and get them, my lack of time to devote to their full testing and figuring out is a possible cause but at the end i just install all new computers "manualy"

"manualy" actualy meaning with a dvd I made, a Unnatended setup of winxp, it has a answer file on it which takes care of all the questions that win xp setup has and also drivers implemented and some software is instaled at the end of the setup. You might want to look at microsofts site about Unattended setups which will take care of the liscence key and all other user input that is needed during setup, there are also recources on the interned about inplementing drivers and applications if you want to go that far but then some scripting knowledge is needed.

Now the bad part, I have tried rederecting cd with SOL to a dvd image and installing it like that on a vPro machine but unfortinatly it didnt work, it did copy all the files at the text mode of the setup but after the reboot it couldnt find the cd anymore. I only played with it a little and im suspecting that i didnt do something right because i never have enough time to play with those computers and it is not a priority for me at the moment since we have a KVM-Over-IP machine that i use for this.

All in all i think this technology is really close to being a real solution even for setting up new computers, if it just had graphic capabilities like ILO on HP servers does then it would be perfect :)
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ravi
Beginner
1,317 Views
Hi Milan /Ajith ,

Thanks lot for your information.
Finally i am able to install the OS remotely.

I created Unattended CD images of XP, 2003,
using that i am able to install the both OS.

I have one question, i created the images using
CD formated one , is Intel AMT supports
DVD formats?, because some where i read it will
not support is it TRUE?


Thanks & Regards,
Ravi
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Ylian_S_Intel
Employee
1,316 Views

Correct. Intel AMT only supports CDROM and not DVD. Hopefulythiswill be fixed infuture platforms.

I want to take this opportunity to talk about a little know fact, afloppy disk image does not have to be 1.44M, it can be much larger. This sitefor example has images that are over 700M, you can find floppy images with very large sizes. I just mount them using Intel AMT Commander, run "HWRESCAN" in Outpost over the serial port to force the remote OS to re-scan PNP devices and the huge floppy will show up. At this point, it's a RW floppy and you can put a lot of files into it.

Just a cool trick.
Ylian (Intel AMT Blog)

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