First, some back story. My laptop's CD drive is broken, and after much tinkering, the local repair store said that the secondary IDE controller is dead. I've tried replacing the CD drive, and it still doesn't work, so I'm agreeing with them for now.
However, I need to reinstall the OS on that machine, and want to go from the 2003 Server R2 to Windows Media Center Edition (just want to try it out). Since booting from the CD rom is out of the question, and 2003 wouldn't let me run the setup from within windows because the MCE version is older, I have to resort to booting over the network.
I've done an RIS installation before, but it requires me to set up an AD domain, have 2003 server up and running somewhere along with a DHCP and DNS server. I could set that up within a virtual machine, but is there another way of accomplishing this? My current machine runs Windows XP, so a PXE environment to run on that would be ideal. Is that even possible, or am I stuck with having to use 2003 server within a VM to facilitate this? Does Norton Ghost have this sort of feature built in? It's not a strict ghosting of an image, but a new installation, so I doubt it, but maybe I'm wrong.