Anyone know if it's possible to PXE boot into NT 4 or 2000? I'm setting up a demo system, and the hard drives are probably going to be wiped quite a bit. So I'm looking into alternate ways of keeping the OS up, outside sticking yet another drive and controller into the box. Another possibility would be a bootable CD.

I'm working on the Linux side of this now, so that the OS utilities can be seen there as well.

Depends on the NIC and the BIOS first. If they're willing W2K will do a boot. The only thing I've used it for is for drive imaging using M$'s imaging tools. A bootable CD may well be more straightforward as there's no need for a boot/TFTP server.

-Zeke

Hmm, well I'm looking for either way to actually run the OS via PXE or bootable CD, and haven't found much info out there.

The BIOS is capable of PXE booting, and allows me to set the NIC to whatever boot priority.

I would think that booting the full OS would be faster off CD, unless you've a very quick network. Of course a W2k install takes about a gig...bootable DVD RW? Perhaps it could be stripped down to 700MB. Can the OS run off a read only (in BIOS) hard drive (no swap file of course)?

If you had a second HD that was mounted R/W then you could put your swap, user files there. Of course you'd be limited in any of these situations in tha t you could not install any (registry-modifying) software beyond what's on the boot image.

Perhaps a well locked down 2k machine would work as well. You can do a zillion things, like lock or remove desktop icons, disable the mouse, or leave the user with no OS modifying permissions. You can even limit what programs are run to a pre-allowed list. I guess it all depends on what your 'demo' machine is demo-ing.

-Zeke