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[notselfcreated]

I know that games get most of the attention in this forum, but I figure some folks can help me here.

Averatec 3200 Laptop - AMD Athlon XP-M 2000+ 1533 MHz, 512MB RAM, VIA/S3G UniChrome Graphics, 40GB 4200RMP Hitachi HD, DVD/CDRW drive.

This thing has been my old-reliable for three years, and now the battery and the optical drive are both completely dead. So I was going to restore it to its original configuration and donate it to my brother who desperately needs a new PC (he's currently running an IBM Thinkpad 600 with Windows 98!)

But I've been having a devil of a time finding a way to run the restore disks without an optical drive. I tried unpacking the ISO of the disks onto a 2GB USB flash drive and booting from it, but no success (All the Web guides I found for doing this are murky and confusing, but the Averatec's BIOS does support flash drive booting).

Next I tried networking the Averatec to the D: drive of a Windows 2000 PC in the office. Still no love: I could explore the contents of the first folder the drive (Administrative shares doesn't work with CDs?), but I don't know the first thing about booting from a networked CD.

I know there MUST be a way to do this. How many ultraportable PCs don't have optical drives? Can anyone help?

[TrekkieTechie]

To initiate a network installation, you must have a network share of the distribution CD or a copy of the CD on a hard drive. The destination system must have network access and the user account must have at least read access to the installation files. Setup is initiated by executing winnt or winnt32 from the network share (the same 16-bit and 32-bit rules apply). For example, from the Start, Run command type a path of \\<servername>\<sharename>\i386\winnt. Setup will recognize an over-the-network installation and will automatically copy all files from the network share to the local system before the first reboot.

More here.

Also, you never mentioned what OS -- I assumed XP.

[notselfcreated]

good assumption. Thanks, will look into it.

[TrekkieTechie]

XP's Setup was designed to be relatively easy to run over a network, so sysadmins wouldn't have to go around to each machine and load it from a disc. You should be able to get it going.

[notselfcreated]

Turns out I was making things unnecessarily difficult. Making a bootable USB drive is easy, and since I had a 2GB flash drive, I just dumped the WinXP Home ISO on there with WinImage. After a little snag getting himem and smartdrv to work, I installed XP Home with no problems.

But that was all after having successfully done the networking thing, too.

I feel so much smarter after today. Thanks TrekkieTechie!

[TrekkieTechie]

You betcha. Glad it worked out.