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Windows Network Install

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mobrien_12:
I do know you could install the Win95 Upgrade version through a network if you had a working Win 3.11 setup with networking.

Was kindof useful back in 95.  Buy two liscences of win95 upgrade, and upgrade 2 computers through cdrom instead of floppys, even if one comp. had no CDROM drive.

voidmain:
I've installed Windows 3.11 through Win2k over the network using a custom boot disk that I created. Haven't tried XP, nor will I.

Another hint. The boot disk I created was DOS 6.22 and Workgroups for DOS based, had drivers for all of the network cards and CDROMs used on our corporate network. Was TCP/IP based and obtained an address via DHCP and used NetBIOS over TCP/IP to map network drives. This was a pretty ingenious disk as it all fit on a single floppy and could be created by clicking on a web page link.  But the disk isn't important.  Being able to map a network drive from a DOS booted floppy is.

If installing NT or 2K from a network drive (just need the I386 directory from the install CD on the network) you run the "winnt" command from that directory on the mapped drive with options.  I believe if you do a "winnt /?" you will get install options.  The gist of NT/2K is the first thing it will do is copy all of the installation files to an area on the local hard disk and bootstrap the install from there.

Microsoft also has a utility that I beleive is freely downloadable that can do a scriptable network install for a custom installation. Don't remember what that is called but we never used it. But what we normally did is create a standard PowerQuest DriveImage image of a standard workstation install and from my network boot disk you could run DriveImage from a network mapped drive and install an image from another mapped network drive or CD (if you could create a small enough image to fit on CD).

So it is possible, and the above are some hints.  You should be able to pick from the above or use different techniques.

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