by terinjokes on 2/28/25, 11:47 AM with 55 comments
by kentonv on 2/28/25, 1:24 PM
I also netboot Windows this way! To run a 20 machines in my house off the same base disk image, which we use for LAN parties. I have code and an extensive guide on GitHub:
https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty
It looks like you actually figured out something I failed at, though: installing Windows directly over iSCSI from the start. I instead installed to a local device, and then transferred the disk image to the server. I knew that building a WinPE environment with the right network drivers would probably help here, but I got frustrated trying to use the WinPE tools, which seemed to require learning a lot of obscure CLI commands (ironically, being Windows...).
You observed some slowness using Windows over the network. I did too, when I was doing it with 1G LAN, but I've found on 10G it pretty much feels the same as local.
BTW, a frustrating thing: The Windows 10->11 updater also seemingly fails to include network drivers and so you can't just upgrade over iSCSI. I'm still stuck on Windows 10 so I'm going to have to reinstall everything from scratch sometime this year. Maybe I'll follow your guide to use WinPE this time.
by MortyWaves on 2/28/25, 12:50 PM
Oh the frustrations I’ve had with Windows and more than one disk during install. For months I had Windows installed on SSD, except the bootloader was on a HDD. I didn’t even realise till I removed the HDD and got the familiar no boot drive found.
Turns out if a drive has Windows on it, and then you decide to install Windows on a new drive, it will detect that bootloader on the old drive and use that. Instead of putting it on the drive you just asked it to install Windows to.
Lesson learned here is always unplug any other drives when installing Windows!
by ahepp on 2/28/25, 4:43 PM
I have been doing this with a lot of my machines at home, and it's been awesome. Swapping what OS boots on what machine is as simple as symlinking a MAC address to a directory on my TFTP server.
I wrote up some notes for doing this on Unix systems: https://ahepp.dev/2024/08/05/linux-without-hdds.html
Looking at it again now, it seems as though these instructions assume the system is being booted in a VM. It's not substantially more difficult to boot on real hardware, as long as you add the relevant network drivers to your initramfs and handle changes to any interface names.
by muhehe on 2/28/25, 2:04 PM
by INTPenis on 2/28/25, 2:03 PM
Clearly it depends a lot on the network backend.
by tehcopec on 2/28/25, 6:03 PM
I've been pretty much Linux only for the last ~15 years or so, but NVMe/TCP is so much faster. I would look at doing a secondary disk applications using NVMe/TCP once booted.
by ratiolat on 3/1/25, 11:50 AM
I guess Microsoft has to make money somehow, but it's not funny. And the worst thing is that you somehow have to magically know this.
by baumschubser on 3/1/25, 12:42 PM
I want netbooks back I think.
by KaiserPro on 2/28/25, 12:24 PM
I knew it was possible, as I'd seen some thin terminals doing something similar (using ephemeral filesystems though) However I've only ever done something like this for linux, rather than windows.
Excellent work, I salute your skill.
by curtisszmania on 2/28/25, 2:36 PM