Windows NT4.0 Server Series | Running Win95 Without a Hard Drive!

Hey everyone,
This is likely the last video for a while at least in this series. But today I'm going to show yo how to "remote boot" or run Windows 95 from a network share without a hard drive installed. This process is rather painful to work with but here goes and enjoy!
Excel File with info:
docs.google.co...
Windows 95 Upgrade CD:
winworldpc.com...
Boot Floppy for netsetup's
archive.org/de...
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0:00 Intro
2:15 Things you will need
2:45 Setting up the Server
4:00 Creating shares
6:00 Setting up network stacks
8:31 Setting up PC's and tools
10:50 Netsetup config
14:22 Editing The INI files for Boot
19:25 Edit boot floppy for Windows Setup
22:18 Starting Windows Setup
27:35 Network adapter's
28:20 Continued Windows Install
29:14 Setting up the boot floppy
33:31 Last install before final boot
38:00 Final boot & Showcase!
43:17 Outro
diskless windows 95

[@procta2343]

Great stuff there buddy! My friend was doing MSDOS networking videos, and i pointed him into RPL booting MSDOS, He did a full blown video on it, probably as close as you will get to this. He gave me a thanks too on the video, I followed his video step by step and i managed to get it to work too, on my later 3Com cards. Windows 95 he managed to do a small video on it, after we chatted about it, but it was very beefy process and he had spent a fair whack of time on the idea. He did have a go at trying to VM it all, but ran into some problems, so the project was mothballed. He did state though if there were enough likes and interest he may come back at it again. A plug in to his channel, Retro Tech Chris. Also NT4 was the very 1st OS that introduced me to domain networking too, i have even had a play with windows 3.51 server too. I may have a play with this, but i think you have to do add the later Network cards to Windows NT4 server side of things, when you build Network boot disks.

[@thesmokingcap]

Apologies for the slow reply! Joys of life getting in the way. Ahh yes! I did see Chris's video on the networking. The process is so picky for sure! Glad you enjoyed the video series. This stuff us fun as it runs on pretty much anything.

[@procta2343]

@@thesmokingcap its great to see it working, I have had a poke about with networking install with windows 95 with the boot disk. You could try the MSDOS side too have a windows 3.1 machine running diskless?

[@thesmokingcap]

@@procta2343I know Windows 3.1 supports network booting. But haven't tried it yet

[@procta2343]

@@thesmokingcap might be worth it for the sake of the views?

[@dacerx]

I had no idea you could do any of this back then

[@thesmokingcap]

It's s pain in the butt and super buggy. But I guess it's from a time where OS's were much smaller

[@fra4455]

Great vídeo👍

[@thesmokingcap]

Thank you! It was a project for sure

[@AnonyDave]

To think, back in the day (long after people had stopped really doing it) I managed to netboot some sparcs into solaris. Was definitely a whole lot smoother than this

[@thesmokingcap]

Oh wow! I don't know much about those machines but is the OS is also larger than Windows 95?

[@AnonyDave]

@@thesmokingcap Early solaris is probably 100MB installed, later ones can be quite a bit more (especially once it started pulling in the stuff you'd normally see in linux). Having some of the best tcp/ip networking support of the era makes the netbooting a lot more bulletproof.
From memory it was just rarp (think dhcp, but much simpler and from a time before dhcp was even thought of) for the bootrom to determine it's ip. Then tftp to grab the kernel. Bootparams (it's a rarely used protocol) to find out where the root filesystem is. Finally, nfs mounts the root filesystem and then you've just got a normal unix system.