The Unofficial Windows 2000 Support page

Remote Installation Service

You can use RIS to quickly and easily install Windows 2000 Professional on a replacement computer. When a user experiences computer problems, you can give the user a computer with an unformatted hard disk as a permanent or temporary replacement. When the user turns on the computer, he or she can use RIS to install the required operating system with the correct configuration, and then use IntelliMirror technologies to install all of the required applications and gain access to personal settings and documents.

RIS only supports the remote installation of Windows 2000 Professional. In addition, RIS does not support images that are created by third-party imaging utilities.

The Network requirements for RIS:

DHCP Server Service
Active Directory
DNS Server Service

The Server requirements for RIS:

2 GB Minimum Total Disk Space
Images Stored on NTFS partition (not the same as system or boot partition)

The Client requriements for RIS:

Windows 2000 Hardware Requirements
Network Boot capability
PXE(Pre-Boot Execution Environment) Boot ROM Version .99c or higher

Start the RIS services setup by running risetup and follow the onscreen instructions. By default, client support is disabled on the RIS server; this will have to be enabled when the server has been configured and all the required image and answer files have been provided.

Provide the RIS Setup Wizard with:

Folder location for images and support files
Initial client support settings
Location of source files
Initial image folder name
Friendly description and Help text

The Setup Wizard will:

Create a RIS folder structure
Copy supporting RIS files to the server
Create a CD-based image of Windows 2000 Professional
Start the services required for RIS

CD-Based images are created automatically on setup and include only the OS; during install the entire image is copied to a temporary folder on the client hard disk. RIPrep images have to be created by using the RIPrep wizard and the images can contain both the OS and applications but the clients must have the same Hardware Abstraction Layer(HAL) as the source computer; during install on the necessary files and registry keys to the client computer, making it more efficient.