Windows on a networked drive?

Priapus · 22 May 2009 at 05:33

Howzit guys,

I have a newish laptop which, for the moment doesn't have a hard drive. What i would like to do, is somehow get Windows XP installed on a networked hard drive. I have one of those external HDD enclosures which has a network port on it. I want the machine to boot off that drive.

This possible? If so, how do I go about setting it up?

Thank you. :cool:

linktoinsanity · 22 May 2009 at 09:23

In theory, you should be able to set the machine to network boot to boot from it. However, as far as installing it is concerned I don't really think setup allows it. However I have read that to get around this, you can install a generic xp installation (no drivers) onto another disk in another machine (same CPU manufacturer etc is prefferable) and use a drive imaging program to stick it on the external drive.

However this is just theory, whether it would actually work I don't know as I've never tried it. Buy yourself an internal hard disk!

Burnsy2023 · 22 May 2009 at 10:47

Put rather simply, this isn't going to work. PXE boots are possible but not with standard XP.

bledd · 22 May 2009 at 10:54

just use a linuxmint live boot cd for the time being

paradigm · 22 May 2009 at 11:17

Can't you just use it as a USB drive?

linktoinsanity · 22 May 2009 at 14:37

Burnsy2023 said:
Put rather simply, this isn't going to work. PXE boots are possible but not with standard XP.

That's what I thought. What does actually work via PXE boots?

Dogoid · 23 May 2009 at 02:11

there is portable xp floating around the web somewhere. put it on usb stick and boot from it.

Burnsy2023 · 23 May 2009 at 10:57

LinktoInsanity said:
That's what I thought. What does actually work via PXE boots?

Well you need to boot into a pre-execution environment by definition. There is very stripped down version of vista, but basically it's only enough functionality to give you the ability to either distribute a proper version of the OS or access terminal services.