What are the best ways to install any Operating system (Linux or Windows) without USB Flash Drive or CD/DVD?

[youself]

What are the best ways to install any Operating system (Linux or Windows) without USB Flash Drive or CD/DVD? I need software for installing any operating system without USB Flash Drive or CD/DVD

[XAIXER]

Floppy disks.

[Mira Yurizaki]

If the system supports virtual hard drive booting, you could install the OS in a VM and use the virtual hard drive image from that.

 

Otherwise PXE is the only other option I'm aware of.

[nox_]

Magic.

BTW you keep creating thread after thread, not even responding after initial post, what's up with that? Looking for attention?

[Viper9]

One word... Why?

[Blai5e]

Gotta be a troll post... with the cost of a 16GB USB stick similar to the price of a coffee, it'd be a no-brainer.

[LogicalDrm]

16 hours ago, Blai5e said:

Gotta be a troll post... with the cost of a 16GB USB stick similar to the price of a coffee, it'd be a no-brainer.

Its not. This person has been here for awhile. They are rather young and ask things we think as obvious because they don't know about those. And they think answers from these forums are better/easier to understand than just using google.

 

Like answer to this is to be use either internal drive (needs to be bootable) or network (how its done in bigger organizations with desktops). Linux can also be installed from executable file, but that will leave current partition there.

[homeap5]

Well, you can install system on another computer and just boot on yours.

[Snowarch]

Install a light weight linux os, and use vms. only iso files needed this way, but vms are slower than full pc even with changed settings. im assuming you're having trouble picking out a distro or wanna test drive one, so this should least let you test without a 2nd machine.

 

or you could install system of choice via usb, and keep wiping it, qnd using wipe and install on a 2nd machine if need full speed. only one usb needed this way.

 

Would recommend virtual box over Vmware player. mainly cause it has more features in free version and is easier to setup.

 

Macantosh os can't really boot in a vm so, If this one you want, hope its your main os already.

 

[Chunchunmaru_]

On 1/28/2020 at 7:30 PM, Mira Yurizaki said:

If the system supports virtual hard drive booting, you could install the OS in a VM and use the virtual hard drive image from that.

 

Otherwise PXE is the only other option I'm aware of.

PXE boot barely works with a modern Linux desktop distro and requires a specific PXE setup (using ipxe, putting up a config) that includes decompressing the disk image and booting specifying the initramfs and the rootfs separately, with Windows there Is something similar but still an hack since modern operating systems will complain booting from PXE for obvious reasons 

 

But there are some other useful ways to use PXE like setting up a FOG imaging server, which deploys Windows 10 images from a full supported PXE boot'd OS, but nowhere here you will have something simple as "boot the installer ISO through PXE" except for very small OS that are set up to run from RAM

 

 

[Programmer Frank]

One word, Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

Yes you can, you can install via PXE, NIC, Network, or even floppy disk.

But why?

To build a PXE server, you need to spend maybe thousand or dollars.

But if you buy a USB flash drive, it maybe cost you less than ten dollars