PXE Boot From ISOs?

[CCash1231]

So I have an Old Tower, I want to slap all of my ISOs on it. And be able to boot from it over the network and choose which one I want, is it possible?

 

[kerberos_20]

nope

 

[BFG-9000]

It depends on the definition of "it."

If you are trying to use the Old Tower as a PXE server, so that you can boot a client from any OS on the server, then yes that is possible and all you would need is a boot manager.

If you are trying to remotely PXE boot the Old Tower from its internal images, and select which one over the network, then that is a different matter. Normally, you would simply change the entire image on the server, but if all of the images are on the client I suppose you could simply have a stub of an OS with pointers back to the local disks (that is, a boot volume on the network and OS volumes on the client). By changing out the pointers in the stub (on the server) you could change which OS boots.

 

[CCash1231]

I want to boot from the old Tower, and use another computer in the network like a laptop that doesn't have an operating system on it boot using pxe and install like Windows 7 how would I go about doing that

 

[BFG-9000]

Microsoft made it pretty difficult to boot Win 7 over a network, because they only want you to boot its PE installer that way. However it is possible via SAN protocols like iSCSI or AoE. Essentially these make the networked drives appear like local disks, and with iSCSI you can install Win 7 directly to the network drive because Win7 includes iSCSI drivers.

While there are plenty of paid solutions to do this, free may require a bit of tinkering.