Installing OS through Network LAN

Community
1

Hello guys!

First of all, Merry Christmas^^!!

I have a small laptop here, an Acer Aspire one Happy without a cd-drive. The harddisk with Windows 7 starter has crashed and I want to format and install Windows Vista on it.
I have an original Vista CD with me, but offcourse I cannot boot it because the laptop doesn’t have a drive.
I do have Symantec Ghostcast on my computer.
I know how it works, and I am able to start up the symantec boot image, through USB and connected over my lan network. But I’m used on putting an image on the client computer. Unfortunately I don’t have an image of the Vista OS.
My question is, how can I install Vista on the laptop using the original cd in my own computer and attached through Ghostcast over the network on the Acer laptop?

Is it worthwile putting that much time in it or should I just simply go out and look for a external cd-drive and attach that to the laptop?

Thanks in Advance!

Kind regards
Maxx-iT

2

Put the contents of the Windows DVD on a thumb drive. Lots of info on that around the web.
Going though the network is possible…but you would need a bit more “stuff” to actually do it.
A thumb drive will be a lot faster.

3

Is your laptop remote boot or PXE capable ? if yes you’ll have to connect it on a network where you have a DHCP/TFTP server available, it will feed your laptop with a floppy image file .
If you have access to a win2000+ server you also can use the RIS service but that’s quite overkill just for one install

4

If you want to get the install done easily, just use an external drive.

5

Ghost won’t work for this. It’s only designed to pull and push image files.

You’ll either have to go with an external CD drive, or [URL=“http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-drive-from-your-windows-cd/”]a bootable USB flash drive.