Installing Windows on a laptop through the network... question.

[bluehorizon]

Situation. There's a laptop with no CD drive that's connected to the network through a built in NIC. The drive needs to be completely wiped and a fresh OS installed. No data backup necessary. How could one format the laptop and install the new OS, assuming that the i386 dir is stored on the network?

I was thinking of booting with a floppy containing the NIC driver for the laptop, and some kind of batch file to connect to the volume on the network where the i386 dir is stored. Would this work? My programming skills are nill... what would the batch file look like? Alternatively, is there another way I should be doing this?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[bluehorizon]

bump

 

[JackMDS]

There are few ways to go about it. In most circumstances when you have the right software it is done by having an image of the Drive with already installed system and ?Ghosting? it through the Network into the empty computer. Once you Ghost you set the Network parameters for the new computer, activate the Lic. of the OS, and Done.

The above can be done with Applications like Acronis TrueImage Server or Symantec Ghost.

However if you don?t have the capacity to do so.

Partition the hard drive on the Lap top into drive C: and D: make D: about 800MB

Boot to Network Transfer the WinXP CD to the D partition and run it to install WinXP.

When done you can repartition and reclaim the space.

No matter what you do you would need a Lic. of Win XP as well as a connection to activate the OS.

:sun: