Is this possible?

J

jfharper

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2005
Messages
166
I am building some barebone systems used only for 3d rendering. They don't need CD/DVD drives or floppies. So to save money, I bought only what I needed. BUT, now I'm wondering how do I get the OS loaded if I don't have a CD drive. The MBs on the systems have on board LAN...is it possible to load the OS from a different computer's CD drive using the onboard LAN, even when the new system's HDD has not even been formatted yet? Also, could I use the USB on the new system to possibly access some utilities for formatting the HDD, etc...is this possible even though there are no drivers or anything loaded on the HDD yet? Thanks for your advice.
 
If the LAN card supports PXE, and you have a PXE server, a DHCP server, DNS Server setup and a RIS server setup you can get it to work.

Or, if you have a thumb drive with "network boot software and NIC drivers on it" you can connect to a machine that has the i386 folder and run "winnt.exe" to get it to start the install process.

Somebody correct me if I missed something...
 
You should be able to do it networkwise. I'm not totally sure of the specifics but I've done some epos work and thats how we were building the tills, via dhcp and the epos server.
 
The easiest way will be to hook up a CD-ROM drive for the install. You do have one in another system don't you?
 
Lothar said:
The easiest way will be to hook up a CD-ROM drive for the install. You do have one in another system don't you?
Click to expand...

Agreed. Unless you are building an army of systems it will be easier/faster to either a)hook up the cdrom to each machine or b)clone the drives assuming the render slaves are all the same hardware.
 
Lothar said:
The easiest way will be to hook up a CD-ROM drive for the install. You do have one in another system don't you?
Click to expand...

Yes. That was my backup plan...I just wasn't sure if there was an easy way to access another drive through LAN...but it sounds way easier to do it this way...thanks for the help.
 
Build one machine with a cd-rom, and one extra harddrive. install windows, configure it with all the updates,when finished if the machines are going to be networked, run sysprep to reset sid, now go get yourself a copy of norton ghost, prepare a boot disk , with ghost.exe on floppy, and image the system drive to the other harddrive. now all you have to do is attach the hdd with the image, to each machine and clone it. you can also do the same thing from a bootable cd or if the image is to big a bootable dvd will be good. use nero to make the bootable cd\dvd.
 
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