what are some alternative ways to install an operating system on a box with no bootable devices?
 

netword card with PXE and RPL available. looking for a good tutorial on how to throw freebsd on an old box through network. no floppy, cdrom or usb available.


thanks

found this....
http://jdc.parodius.com/freebsd/pxeb...l_install.html

I can't get any connectivity to the server.

take the hard disk out of the box and put in in another one (or use one of those external connectors)
clone the hard disk of that box onto that drive.
put the drive back into the original box.

i'm using CCBoot, is there something better for a windows 7 pxe boot server?

yea i'm thinking this is going to be easier.

(old external CDrom with serial cable) > possible, but pretty slow.

Best is to get the HD out, format on a different PC, and install a bootmanager on the disk (don't forget the MBR). Then install from the bootmanager through BartPE or Hiren's BootCD... if you just install the OS on the other PC directly, you're getting problems with the hardware configs, as the other PC has different hardware... Windows will not work after different hardware is detected... FreeBSD / Linux will install the wrong drivers, could bounce back later.

Install the OS on the PC you're gonna use.

Sounds like getting PXE working will be the way to go, but if there's an OS on there now you can drop an installation boot image on the hard drive.

You'll be in the same situation again if you ever need to boot with a rescue disk. What I've done to be proactive is I put a little 20MB mini-distro as an initramfs on /boot. That way in the future if I can't boot the OS I have the initramfs based mini-distro as rescue environment.