Can Comp. with no hard drive boot windows over a network?

[camara120]

The BIOS has an option for network boot.

Is there any way to set up a server and have the no hard drive computer boot windows off of that server?

 

[Nothinman]

Unlikely, except maybe with the speciel embedded versions of XP.

 

[camara120]

Could iSCSI do it?

 

[camara120]

anyone?

 

[PowerMacG5]

What Nothinman said is pretty much correct. Windows in it's current form doesn't have what you are referring to a network boot. The closest thing is Terminal Services and RIS. What you can do is set up a cheapo Windows 95 computer, and use the Terminal Services client to connect to a more powerful and more resourceful server.

 

[foxkm]

Some NICs have an option to boot to a network server, i have never seen it done, but I know that there used to be something you could install on a win95 machine to make a clone image that would be available for network boot with machines with NIC's that support booting. It would remotely mount the image as a C: drive locally and boot off it. Way back in high school we used to have a ton of 386s with the really old Ethernet and none of them had hard drives, they all booted up DOS from the network server (486) running some sort of novel server.

If you figure out how it works anymore, I would be interested as this makes for an easy thin client.

foxkm

 

[Nothinman]

If you figure out how it works anymore, I would be interested as this makes for an easy thin client.

Any recent Windows can't do that, it's just not designed for it. I even highly doubt Win95 did that at your school, no offense.

 

[camara120]

A Macintosh with no hard drive can boot an OS over a network right?

 

[Nothinman]

A Macintosh with no hard drive can boot an OS over a network right?

OS X is based on unix so it's very possible, I have no idea about OS 9 and earlier.

 

[kursplat]

messing around once i imaged a win98 boot partition to a cd-r , set comp to boot from cd and it went into windows just fine........until the cd-rom spun down...
good luck