Revision Date: 5/31/2013 Time 1.0 Hour K EY P OINTS USB boot technology might not work on older computer s The PXE boot method requires special equipment in order to work properly PXE is the method for installing operating systems across a network. Booting your computer using the following methods CD/DVD ROM, USB and PXE may require you to enter your computer s BIOS and reconfigure it to recognize those options. Fat32 is the file system compatible with the widest range of operating systems Unattended installation is the way a technician can install information to many computers at one time CDFS is the best method to format optical media There are multiple ways to install software and Operating Systems W INDOWS I N S T A L L A T I O N B OOT M E T H O D S CD ROM/DVD DRI VE BOOT you are actually running the computer with a small Operating System or Recovery Console software stored on the CD or DVD rather than the computer s hard drive. In order to do this you need to perform the following steps: 1. Configure your BIOS so the CD/DVD ROM drive is listed first. 2. Insert the CD/DVD into the drive. 3. Restart your computer. 4. Watch for Press any key to boot from CD or DVD message to appear on your screen 5. Your computer should now boot from your CD/DVD drive. Normally this takes 10-20 minutes to properly complete. USB BOOT is a USB flash drive or a USB external hard disk drive containing a full operating system that can be used to boot your computer. There are some limitations with this technology: 1. Older computers (pre-2001) BIOS usually does not support booting from a USB device. Around 2001, manufacturers started to add USB boot support as part of the motherboard. 2. There are two common BIOS methods for direct USB booting: a. The "USBHDD" method boots a USB mass storage device that is configured like a normal PC hard drive. b. The "USBZIP" method supports booting from a USB storage device that behaves like the original IOMEGA ZIP drive with USB support. 3. Most modern (2006+) computers will have USB support turned on automatically. 4. If not, you will have to enter the BIOS Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 1
5. Find the Menu item for motherboard boot order, boot device or alternate boot methods or similar verbiage. 6. Put USB drive first 7. Restart the computer 8. Finish the boot process PREBOOT EXECUTION ENVIR ONME NT (PXE) is a way you can boot your computer entirely from the network without any form of storage on the destination computer. You can run a complete OS off the network using just the RAM, or you can mass-install/update an OS stored on the local hard disk. Your average home hardware router will not work because the PXE client has to receive an additional Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) option that most of the routers do not support. A Cisco router capable of running IOS 12.2 or higher and DHCP has the ability to specify the option-number if it's acting as the DHCP server. This is part of the "Enterprise Feature Set" PXE Boot Process. Here are the steps to boot from PXE 1. PXE client boots up, starts up PXE boot ROM. 2. The PXE boot ROM sends a DHCP request. 3. The responding DHCP request should contain an additional DHCP option, the "filename" options. (This is why the average hardware router won't work. You can't specify the needed options.) 4. The PXE client attempts to download the file specified over Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). (If not specified, the client tries to connect to the computer that gave it the DHCP lease. If the next-server parameter is specified, it will instead attempt to download the file off of that server. ) 5. If the PXE client downloads the file, it then executes this file and from there PXE is out of the picture. 6. The computer should then go through the normal boot up process. FIGURE 1 : PXE BOOT PROCESS Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 2
T YPE OF INSTALLATIONS CREATING AN IM AGE A type of installation that allows the user to specify certain installation settings and options, such as which components will be installed. UNATTENDED INSTALLATI ON - is performed without user interaction during the process. An unattended installation does not require the user to supply anything because all necessary input was supplied prior to the start of the installation. Such input may be in the form of command line switches or a file that contains parameters. Unattended installations record errors in a computer log for later review by an actual user. UPGRA DE INSTALLATION - is where an operating system is installed over an existing version of Windows. You should always choose the upgrade installation option because all the existing applications and settings remain intact and you won t have to reinstall them after the upgrade. CLEAN I NSTALL is where an OS is installed on a hard drive that does not have an OS installed on it or the hard drive has been newly formatted and is now blank. REPAIR I NSTALLATION - this type of install is used when system restore did not fix the problem you are having and you do not want to do a Clean Reinstall. MULTIP OINT Is where multiple operating systems are installed on one computer, and the user is able to choose which one to boot when starting the computer. REMOTE NET WORK INSTALLAT ION (RIS) is a Microsoft-supplied server that allows PXE BIOS-enabled computers to remotely install operating systems or computer configurations. This eliminates the need to use a CD/DVD-ROM for installations. DEPLOYME NT IMAGE SE R VICI NG A ND MANAGEME NT (DISM.exe) is a command-line tool that can be used to service a Windows image or to prepare a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) image. It replaces Package Manager (Pkgmgr.exe) that was included in Windows Vista. F ILE SYSTEM TYPES FAT short for File Allocation Table / FAT 32 file systems are general purpose file systems used in earlier versions of Windows operating systems, including Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Millennium Edition. FAT32 does not have the security that NTFS provides. Because of its overly simplistic structure, FAT suffers from issues such as over-fragmentation, file corruption, and limits to file names and size. NTFS short for New Technology File System is a modern, file system that is used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. It is an improvement over FAT32 due to its capability to recover from some disk-related errors automatically has improved support for larger hard disks and has better security due to the use of permissions and encryption to restrict access to specific files to approved users. It should be defragmented every one to two months. CDFS Short for CD File System is the Windows driver for CD-ROM players. CDFS replaces MSCDEX that was used for MS- DOS and is a 32-bit program that runs in protected mode. In addition, CDFS uses a VCACHE driver to control the CD-ROM disk cache allowing for a smoother play back. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 3
P ARTITIONING DIS K FORMATTING AND S T O R A G E PARTITIONI NG of a hard drive occurs after the drive has been physically (low-level) formatted, but before it is logically (high-level) formatted. It involves creating areas on the disk where data will not be mixed. It can be used, for example, to install different operating systems that do not use the same file system. PHYSICA L FOR MATTING - When you buy a hard drive, it has already undergone low-level formatting, so you do not need to perform this. The purpose is to divide the disk surface to receive data into the basic elements of: 1. TRACKS - are the concentric areas written on both sides of a platter. Tracks are numbered starting from 0. 2. SECT OR S Tracks are divided into pieces called sectors numbered starting from 1 and separated by gaps. There are millions of tracks and each has around 60 to 120 sectors. Each of these sectors starts with an area reserved for system information called a prefix and ends with an area called a suffix. 3. CYLI NDERS -Refers to all the data located on the same track of different platters (i.e. vertically on top of each other) as this forms a "cylinder" of data in space. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 4
LOG ICA L FORMATTING occurs after the low-level formatting. It creates a file system on the disks that will allow an operating system to use the disk space to store and access files. There are three types of partitions: primary partitions, extended partitions and logical drives. A disk may contain up to four primary partitions (only one of which can be active), or three primary partitions and one extended partition. PRIMARY P ARTITIO N EXTENDE D P ARTITIO N C D E F LOGIC AL DRIVE S PRIMARY - A primary partition contains one file system. In DOS and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows systems, the system partition was required to be the first partition. More recent Windows operating systems (Windows 7, XP, 8.) can be located on any partition, but the boot files (bootmgr, ntldr, etc.) must be on a primary partition. A partition must contain the primary OS. A disk may contain up to four primary partitions (only one of which can be active), or three primary partitions and one extended partition. EXTENDED - A hard disk may contain only one extended partition; the extended partition can be subdivided into multiple logical partitions. In DOS/Windows systems, each logical partition may then be assigned an additional drive letter. In the extended partition, the user can create logical drives (i.e. "simulate" several smaller-sized hard drives). LOG ICA L - Logical drives function like primary partitions except that they cannot be used to start an operating system. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 5
TYPES OF DISK STORA GE FI LE SYSTEM enables applications to store and retrieve files on storage devices. Files are placed in a hierarchical structure. The file system specifies naming conventions for files and the format for specifying the path to a file in the tree structure. File systems can exist on many different types of storage devices, including hard disks, removable optical disks, and memory cards. All file systems supported by Windows have the following storage components: VOLUME is used to refer to the concept of a disk partition formatted with a valid file system, most commonly NTFS. A volume has a Win32 path name, can be enumerated by the FindFirstVolume and FindNextVolume functions, and usually has a drive letter assigned to it, such as C: DIRECT ORY is a hierarchical collection of file on a storage disk. Files are logical grouping of related data placed in a hierarchical structure BA SIC DISK PA RTITIONING I S the storage type most often used with Windows. The term refers to a disk that contains partitions, such as primary partitions and logical drives, and these in turn are usually formatted with a file system to become a volume for file storage. Basic disks provide a simple storage solution that can accommodate a useful array of changing storage requirement scenarios. DYNAMIC P ARTITIONING - is a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system and has the ability to reassign processors, memory and I/O to specific applications on the fly without shutting down the machine. The reassignment can be done by the operator or automatically from a script that monitors conditions such as time of day or when the traffic to one application becomes excessive. DYNAMIC D ISK PA RTITIONING is a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system that provides features basic disks do not, such as: The ability to create volumes that span multiple disks (spanned and striped volumes). The ability to create fault-tolerant volumes. Greater flexibility for volume management because they use a database to track information about dynamic volumes on the disk and about other dynamic disks in the computer. Can repair one dynamic disk by using the database on another dynamic disk. The location of the database is determined by the partition style of the disk. On MBR partitions, the database is contained in the last 1 megabyte (MB) of the disk. On GPT partitions, the database is contained in a 1-MB reserved (hidden) partition. Dynamic disks and volumes rely on the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) and Virtual Disk Service (VDS) and their associated features. H ARD D RIVE F O R M A T T I N G FULL FORMAT - When you run a full disk format on a volume, the files are removed from the volume and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. It is the scan for bad sectors that is responsible for the bulk of the time that it takes to format the volume. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 6
QUICK FORMAT When you run the Quick format option, format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors. Only use this option if your hard disk has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard disk is not damaged. Load alternate third party drivers when necessary WOR KGR OU P V S. DOMAIN SETUP Domains and workgroups represent different ways to organize computers in a network. Computers running Windows on a network must be part of a workgroup or a domain. In a workgroup: All computers are peers; no computer has control over another computer. Each computer has a set of user accounts. To log on to any computer in the workgroup, you must have an account on that computer. There are typically no more than twenty computers. A workgroup is not protected by a password. All computers must be on the same local network or subnet. In a domain: At least one of the computers is a server. Administrators use servers to control the security and permissions for the computers on the domain. Domains allow changes to be made easily because they are automatically made to all computers at one time. Domain users must provide a password or other credentials each time they access the domain. If you have a user account on the domain, you can log on to any computer on the domain without needing an account on that computer. Domains can contain thousands of computers Domain computers can be on different local networks. DATE AND TIME / RE GI ON AND LA NGUA GE Was redesigned with Windows XP. The Control Panel now contains two sections one is Date and Time the other is Regional and Language These are the eighth of the nine categories under Category View in Control Panel. Open Control Panel, Click Clock, Language and Region this will open the panel to do the following: Date, Time, Time Zone and Calendar In the Date and Time dialog box, click the Change date and time tab to set the date and time in the format you want. Click the Change time zone dialog box to set your time zone. When you click the Region and Language dialog box this opens a menu with the following tabs: Format, Location, Keyboard and Languages. These tabs set your time format by country, your location, the keyboard layout and language you want the system to work in. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 7
DRIVER INSTALLATION, SOFT WA RE AND WIND OWS UPDAT ES When a new device is detected, Windows checks the driver store to see if an appropriate driver package is staged there. If not, it checks several locations to find a driver package to place in the driver store. In order, these locations are: The folders specified in the DevicePath registry setting. Windows Update on the Web. A file path or media provided by the user. After Windows locates the driver package, it is copied to the driver store, and then installed from there. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 8
FACT ORY RE COVERY PARTITION also called Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partition is a partition that contains important recovery data for emergency use. If you buy a computer as a prebuilt system, it will have at least one OEM drive already installed. Computer manufacturers who specialize in prebuilt systems are among those who order OEM hard drives in bulk, since they do not need a separate set of drivers and packaging for each drive that they install. Factory recovery partition is very useful in case you want to reset your system settings back to the factory settings. The partition size varies with different make and models of systems. Cyanna Education Services, 2013 Page 9