PXE boot difficulties

[yukichigai]

So there's a little challenge I've put myself to, and have been working at over the past few days. I am in possession of a 2002 model Vaio laptop which (in Sony's infinite wisdom) does not have an onboard CD-Rom or floppy drive, but instead relies on a docking station that currently holds a broken CD-Rom drive. ALSO in Sony's infinite wisdom it cannot boot to a USB drive, but ONLY to one of their proprietary "i.Link" drives. (A simple firewire drive won't cut it, I tried) The only option then, it would seem, is to install XP via the network. I successfully managed to get a working PXE boot server working via this guide, but the kernel bundled with the program (and the related projects) does not support the laptop's network card.

I also attempted to use a dos boot disk with network support in order to mount a shared network drive, but I kept running into a "Not enough memory" error. I'm sort of out of ideas. Have you got any?

 

[JohnG86]

I ran into a laptop that needed the OS reinstalled with no CD Drive. I got around the problem by using PXEKnife to boot gparted and created 2 FAT32 partitions, and format both. The 2nd partition was only slightly larger then the Win XP CD. The next step was to boot into a Linux live CD and copy the XP CD to the 2nd partition from a network share. Finally boot into dos from a Win98 floppy image using PXEknife, load smartdrv.exe to greatly reduce install time and start the XP setup (D:\i386\WinNT.exe) from the 2nd partition. In the Win XP setup, format the 1st partition which should be labeled as C: as NTFS and proceed as normal.

 

[yukichigai]

Hrm... I don't have a linux server up and running on the current network. I'd rather avoid having to jump through the hoops of setting up a new linux machine if I can. If not, I'll use PXEknife... but... meh.