Windows XP is pretty old, but however, you may know those friends which are using quiet ooooold laptops, having a system crash but don’t want to purchase a new one. When those laptops don’t have a working CD-ROM drive anymore and you (me) don’t have an USB one and the box doesn’t not support booting from USB drive, then you have a problem – called PXE

The solution for this is a project called ris-linux. I don’t want to repeat the whole solution here, but point you to some resources about that:

• http://oss.netfarm.it/guides/ris-linux.php
• http://oss.netfarm.it/guides/ris-linux.pdf
• http://www.sjkingston.com/blog/pxe-boot-windows-xp-setup-from-linux/

Using this information I got it working for a Toshiba Satellite. The only problem was the network driver y51x86.sys. The one from the pxefiles package – mentioned in the third tutorial – didn’t worked. I’ve downloaded the recent version from Marvel Yukon, and that did the trick for me. (after x hours)

Currently installing ….

bye!