WDS - Can i somehow make it so the network boots XP as if reading from CD?

Hi All,

Sorry about the long heading but basically we run WDS at work (I set it up about 2 years ago and have not used it since!)

My problem is this. We have purchased a number of machines that came with XP home and i need to change this to XP Pro so they can connect to the domain. To do this I need to install XP, the problem is these machines do not come with CD Rom drives.

WDS is working fine as I just copied an XP image i had made when I originally set it up to the new machine but unfortunately the mismatched HALS are causing the computer to sit in a reboot cycle. I would repair the install but alas no CD-ROM and using a network share to a CD-ROM wont work as the XP install is done outside the windows environment.

So basically long story short I was wondering is there any way to use WDS so that there is a base XP image that does not have a pre-installed Windows HAL. I want to be able to boot off the network and choose this image and it loads it as if its booting XP from a CD.

Is this possible? I know it was in the past with RIS and I imagine it surely would be, but I cant for the life of me work out how??? I have a Vista image that does this but cannot find out how its done for XP if at all?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance!

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Comments

Forsaken_GA

is purchasing an external dvd/cd drive and then using that to boot the installer not an option, or will these machines not boot from USB? That would, I think, by far be the easiest solution. Or maybe a thumb drive

Other than that, no idea about WDS, but I'd be very surprised if you couldn't use pxelinux to pxe boot an xp install image.

albanga

Hi Forsaken,

That is definitely an option I have considered. I just wanted to run this past here first and see if it is possible. It would be great for this situation but also ideal to have the option for the future.

In the interim my supplier is sending me a PC with a XP Pro image and then i can just make an image of that so should be fine in this instance.

Thanks for the suggestion

Hyper-Me

Thats not possible, because WDS is a native installer for Vista and Windows 7 which both use the image based installation. XP does not.

You could make new images for the new XP stations, and use WDS.

If you need to boot to WDS the PXE method should work fine.

If not, you could put a discover image on a USB flash drive and boot to that.