Hi, I forgot to add that depending on your install media you might not be looking at booting from usb from the point of view of the bios. I have a caddy that takes a 2.5 optical drive and makes it into an external usb drive; the chipset that it uses makes it show up as a cd drive as opposed to USB and I've used it successfully on older systems when booting from usb according to the bios isn't possible. Cheers, Ben. On 8/28/12, Ben Mustill-Rose <ben@benmr.com> wrote:
Hi,
You may have success using some form of ocr; the 2 approaches to this involve:
Taking a picture of the screen with an iPhone / other camera. You can then attempt to ocr it on the device or for potentially better results try transferring the image to a computer and doing it there. It's also possible to use a cheap capture card to grab the output of the screen directly as an image and perform ocr on that; this way the blind photographer is taken out of the equation. You may have success with a very expencive device called a pc wezel which is meant to be able to let you control the bios through serial, but I have no experience with it and I'm guessing that it's not going to work with uefi based systems.
Personally, I'd try deleting the partitions on any installed hard drives and then seeing if it will boot from usb; quite often I find that if a bios can't find anything to boot from that's in the boot order it will try absolutely anything (Even pxe in some situations), but if it sees a hard drive with a partition on it (Even if it's empty) it will just print a generic operating system not found message. As a last resort, you may be able to get the installer booting by disconnecting the sata cable from the target drive, starting to boot from usb and then fairly quickly connecting it again. This works much better under 7 where you are able to hotswap drives.
Assuming one of the above methods works for you and that the hardware is more or less the same between systems, I'd probably get one good install going, make an image and deploy that to the rest of the systems; this can be done in Windows.
Cheers, Ben.
On 8/28/12, Alex Coleman <AlexC@davis-express.com> wrote:
Does anyone have any tips on how to modify system bios settings with speech, or through some other means? Most all of our machines are some flavor of Dell Precision workstations. Specifically, I need to be able to set the boot priority so that I can boot from a USB device. ... Trying to setup a Windows 7 Unattended Install. Thanks for any pointers or help that you can provide. Alex _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins