PXE / Network Install - Error PXE-E51

[yngndrw]

Hi,

I'm trying to use network booting to install Windows Server 2003 on a little Intel Atom system. I've been using this guide:
[url]http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[/url]

I've set up Tftpd32 in a Virtual Machine (Host: Vista 64bit, Guest: Vista 64bit.) using VMware Workstation 6.5.3 as I want to be able to just roll it back to a snapshot when I'm done. There is one virtual network card set up which is bridged with my host's network card. On the host I'm also using Windows bridging between both physical network cards and Hamachi.

When I try to boot the Atom machine, it searches for DHCP offers and after a short while I receive the error:
[b]PXE-E51: No DHCP or proxyDHCP offers were received.[/b]

I've also looked at the console of Tftpd32 which shows that it has noticed the request and assigned an IP address to the Atom machine. I tried disabling the Windows firewalls on both the host and guest machines, but that didn't help.

Hardware wise, the Host is running an EVGA X58 SLi, the Intel Atom is an ASRock A330GC and they are connected together through a Netgear GS108 switch. My router's DHCP is disabled as it never worked anyway.

Any ideas as to how I could fix this ? Thanks for any help.

[yngndrw]

A little update and change of problem. I removed the drive from the Atom system and put it in my main PC. From here I formatted the drive using FAT32, aligned it to 64K (128 sectors.) and copied the I386 directory to it. I then put the drive back into the Atom system and used a bootable floppy to load A:\smartdrv.exe and C:\I386\winnt.exe

The text / DOS stage of the installation went without problems and the system rebooted. After the reboot I get the message "Missing operating system". I have read that this is due to an invalid MBR but I've tried the following methods to fix this and they have all failed:
*) sys c: from a Windows 98 boot disk
*) fdisk /mbr from a Windows 98 boot disk
*) mbrfix.exe from my main machine

I also used fdisk to double check that the partition is active, which it is.

The Server 2003 recovery console does not work for me so I cannot use that. In fact the Server 2003 setup CD never loads for me at all, hence why I have trued network and local installs. When I try and boot from the CD, it spins up and then just hangs on a black screen.

Any ideas ?

Thanks.

[yngndrw]

Could I have this thread moved to "Hardware and Software > Windows" please, as the subject has changed since the original post and some of the people who may know of a possible solution may only browse that area.