PXE-Enabled Bootdisk for Virtual PC 2004
The Network Interface Card (NIC) that Virtual PC 2004 uses is not PXE compliant. PXE is short for Pre-Boot Execution Environment. PXE-enabled NICs allow a computer to boot from the network – just like they can boot from a CDROM or a floppy drive. They access an image on a server over the network that allows them to boot up and run operating systems, software, diagnostics, etc.
Why is that important for Virtual PC 2004? Well, if you want to play around with RIS (Remote Installation Services) or ADS (Automated Deployment Services), you need a PXE-enabled NIC. The next best thing to having that within VPC 2004 (coming in the next version I’m told…) is a floppy bootdisk image that pretends to be a PXE-enabled NIC. All you do is point your Virtual PC to this floppy image and you’re done…from the workstation, that is. You’ll still need to configure another Virtual PC with whatever services you’re planning on testing/using.
What I found is that the RIS bootdisk that is distributed for computers that don’t support PXE will work just fine as an all-around PXE bootdisk for Virtual PC 2004.
Click Here to Download RBFG.ZIP (Contains the VPC Floppy Image)
Thank you for posting this floppy image. I’m trying to ghost a sysprep’d image that I have into a virtual machine in VPC2004sp1. I was able to do this with vmware. I just did a pxe boot into a ghost session and then ghosted the image over. I tried using this boot disk to pxe boot the VPC, and it worked fine. The only problem is, my ghost session won’t start for some reason. I tried both multicast and unicast, but it can’t connect to the server. Have you had this problem before and found any solution?
Thanks.