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Comment by bshep | Hacker News Reader

Can network boot be done for Windows and OSX? I've looked around and never found a good tutorial or anything to point me in the right direction ( well at least for Windows, I havent really looked for OSX yet ). I did get it working for linux though and it was really useful since I only needed to push updates once.

If anyone has any links or pointers I would be very interested.

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Recent versions of Windows have iSCSI support built-in; you can actually just export a normally-installed version via iSCSI and everything will just work (in theory). For XP there's a program called "sanbootconf" that you can install to make it work. http://etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot has some pretty good tutorials.

OS X for sure has network booting. I believe it is referred to as 'netboot'. http://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+netboot

How about windows? I would LOVE to have my home/work windows PCs netboot

I don't think you can share out a folder and get Windows to boot using it as the system drive, but I think you can get Windows to boot without a local hard drive and instead using an iSCSI LUN as the hard disk.

http://www.google.com/search?q=windows%20boot%20from%20iscsi

Has various things which look like guides and relevant discussions.

Thank you!!! That site looks really useful!

EDIT: Oops this should have gone under 'oremanj' link (http://etherboot.org/wiki/start) I got the gPXE chainloading working already, took some trial and error.

If anyone else is interested try the 'alldrivers' option rather than the 'undionly' option when making your .kpxe ( http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-git/gpxe.git/contrib/rom-o-... )

I didn't mean it in the "Let me google that for you" sense, but meant "try looking for iSCSI related things instead of PXE related things - look here are some results which support the idea that it's possible using that approach, but I don't know enough about diskless Windows booting to be able to pick a result which isn't terrible and unhelpful".

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