#How to netboot windows 32 bit
To point out we will prepare a 32 bit WinPE image in C:\WinPEdirectory and then use the C:\TFPT-Root\Bootto place the boot files (SolarWind TFTP server defaults to C:\TFTP-Root, feel free to change). You may also notice that I also configured the DHCP server to server IP addresses from the same private class (10.0.0.xxx). I manually setup the Ethernet adapter on my “server” to use 10.0.0.1 IP address (easier to type) and disabled the firewall as well as the wireless adapter for the duration of the exercise (you can probably just as easily add the server programs below as exceptions to the firewall) – if you do it like me, remember to re-enable the firewall back on when finished and to set the Ethernet adapter for automatic IP allocation later on.
Since I already have a router on the network with a DHCP server running, to avoid conflicts I used an Ethernet hub I had around to connect the two laptops directly. To make things even more complicated, you have to prepare the boot image with Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) – you can find a lot more information for that one the web, but it does require quite a large download of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) – in my case I downloaded version 3.0 for Windows 7. They seemed to have done the job well for other people, but for me the embedded TFTPD server failed a lot on transferring the BCD store during tests with a local VM, so I finally stopped using that and eventually found SolarWind TFTP Server much more reliable. Somehow I always thought booting through PXE would be easy (just as easy as the USB or DVD boot) – and how wrong I was, as it requires both a DHCP server that allows to specify a boot program and TFTP server, neither of which is easily found on the net (details on Intel Boot Agent).Įventually I did stumble onto TFTPD32/64 and Serva32/64 – both looking fairly similar which is fair enough cause the second is based on code from the first one.
So after two days and a lot of failed attempts, here it is.
#How to netboot windows install
Having an older Vaio VGN-A115B laptop with not enough disk space on the system partition (running the setup.exe from the older OS it says it requires 16 GB free, although it will happily install later on a 12 GB partition), a shot DVD drive that couldn’t read a DVD-RW disk with Windows 8 installer and on top of that didn’t seem to power the USB ports at boot, the only option I was left off was to do a network boot ( PXE) – something I always wanted to try.
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