Windows 2008 Installer as a PXE Option

One on the challenges with Windows 2008 is the fact that it requires a DVD drive to install the OS from standard media, and many of our servers only have a DVD ROM.

To solve this problem we created a custom Win PE boot option called W2K8 Setup 64bit & W2K8 Setup 32bit and instead of starting AClient we call Windows setup.

First off create a new PE boot option. Once at the Edit Configuration screen (step 9) choose New then Text file. Select the file and change the name to runagent.bat. Delete any text in the runagent.bat file so that file is blank.

Click to view.

Then select the startup.bat file and add the full path to your setup.exe file under the :UserActions line F:\images\w2k8\setup.exe in my case, save it then your ready to boot into setup without accessing the DS console.