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====== Booting Windows XP SP2 over SMB ====== Windows XP SP2's RIS support allows for it to boot entirely over SMB. ===== Setup the Share ===== Create a directory on your hosting Windows system called **C:\NetXP\**. ===== Copy a Windows XP SP2 Installation ===== Install a fresh Windows XP SP2 installation on the target computer (perhaps a VM). For best results, make it a pretty vanilla (plain) install by choosing default options as much as possible. Make sure to install the NIC. This will populate **C:\Windows\Inf\** with the ***.INF** file (perhaps as **OEM*.INF**) as well as copy the ***.SYS** driver into **C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\**. Once installed, use Device Manager and __un-install__ the NIC. Be careful of the NIC re-installing on reboots. You want to make sure it is un-installed before copying this Windows installation into the SMB share. Shut down the target computer. Remove its HDD and attach it to your hosting Windows system. Copy all of the files from the target Windows installation into your **C:\NetXP\** directory. C:\>xcopy /e /h e:\* c:\netxp\ ===== Modify the Directory Structure ===== ===== Limitations ===== Only one client at a time can be booted with this setup, unless you duplicate the share for each client. If you want to save disk space, you could use lots of hard-linking for pretty well every file except the pagefiles and registries, but this is a huge mess without a batch file to set it up.
