Possible to install Windows through a network?

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

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Hi all, got a bit of a problem, got a laptop which has a doofered cd drive in it and i want to reinstall windows on it. Is it possible to hook it up my network at home and then do a windows format/install/setup through that? Or am i going to have to find a big enough pen drive and install via usb?
 
There's loads of ways to do this, either through a ghost boot disk with network drivers (requires a floppy drive) or if you have a windows server you can do it through RIS (but that's a bit hardcore and require quite a lot of knowledge and a windows server box).

You're main issue is booting the machine without a CDROM or floppy which could be an issue. You'll either need a way to do it via a USB flash drive or a PXE network boot.

Burnsy
 
Cheers Burnsy, i did find an external floppy drive but that route was shafted when we didnt have any blank floppys. What would be my port of call after formatting via the floppy? I was going to say copy the i386 folder from the cd onto a networked computer then copy that across the network the the laptop and install from that, but i've no idea if i could access the network after its been fully formated :s
 
Have you already got an os on it? You could just copy the installation files to a remote machine and go into the I386 directory and run winnt32.exe, which will start the install from the distribution server. It's called "Network Install".
 
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Yeh there is an OS already installed, if i do this, will i be able to format the machine too? Or will it just rewrite over everything with a new copy of windows.
 
CDj-Rossi said:
Yeh there is an OS already installed, if i do this, will i be able to format the machine too? Or will it just rewrite over everything with a new copy of windows.
Click to expand...

No it does not format the drive alough, if you create a PXE environment, where all you would need is a boot floppy (network boot disk) [netbootdisk.com]. And then run winnt.exe from the shared folder it will do the same job, except it will allow you to format.

You could map a network drive and then run the desired executable. Thus you can then format the drive eitha full or quick.

Code: 
REM ------ Automatically run setup from the distribuation server ---
net use x: \\SERVER\xpcd\
x:
cd\i386
winnt.exe

Should do the job nicely.
 
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