Is it possible to install an OS over a network?

thermg

thermg

thermg

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Hi,

As title really. I work for a company that refurbs old laptops and PCs to sell them on. We have a laptop without a cd rom drive or floppy and I would like to know if it would be possible to install an OS from an image on the network? And if it is possible how would I go about it?

Many thanks in advance
 
man i never thought of this.
i'm in a similar situation with my housemates lappy, it has no FDD, it wont boot from CD nor USB, so reasonably stuck when it comes to formatting :D
 
You could use a PXE compatible NIC and Microsofts RIS server to remotely install operating system images. But it's overkill for one laptop. It still could be handy, if you're doing this excercise quite a lot.
 
I seem to remember seeing boot from network location in my BIOS options? Maybe you could make an image of the CD, mount the image, share the virtual drive & choose that option in the BIOS?

Craig.
 
aix0 said:
You could use a PXE compatible NIC and Microsofts RIS server to remotely install operating system images. But it's overkill for one laptop. It still could be handy, if you're doing this excercise quite a lot.
Click to expand...

Yes, this way works perfect. If your gettin the same make of laptops or same pc hardware RIS is very easy to impliment.
 
Another way is just to store a ghost (or other products) image on a network share and use a network boot disk to download the image.

Works well.
 
Hi wyrdo.

I've wanted to install from a network as well. When you say network boot disk, would you eleborate? What program would I use to do this?
 
There are many ways of doing this, in fact where I work we have a method which involves PXE booting a linux microkernel (which is then copied to the hard disk for subsequent rebuilds), downloading a compressed image using curl, then installing it onto the hard disk using dd.

the team that built this also included lots of useful functionality such as hooks into AD, HAL detection and even automatic driver downloads so the same image can be used on many types of systems, as long as their drivers are stored in the central repository.

All totally free (as in beer), heterogeneous, and open source and all for the investment of several thousand man-hours :)
 
Gandalf501 said:
Hi wyrdo.

I've wanted to install from a network as well. When you say network boot disk, would you eleborate? What program would I use to do this?
Click to expand...

Barts bootdisk - http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/
or the modular one are pretty easy to utilise, they're free too.

Just get it to map a drive to a share on a network containing the ghost dos executable and the drive image, and either run it manually or stick the commandline options in the batch file.

EDIT:
Just re-read the post and noted the lack of floppy (Doh!) though it can be used from a USB drive also
 
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We use RIS along with a PXE boot to load up Norton Ghost where we then select the image we want. Saves a lot of time messing about with floppys however remote installation services is not one of the easiest services to set up :)
 
Trigger said:
We use RIS along with a PXE boot to load up Norton Ghost where we then select the image we want. Saves a lot of time messing about with floppys however remote installation services is not one of the easiest services to set up :)
Click to expand...

I am literally just doing this right now with Acronis Snap deploy PXE server. I prefer it to RIS and Ghost.

Burnsy
 
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