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Network booting, shortenednetboot, is the process ofbooting acomputer from anetwork rather than a local drive. This method of booting can be used byrouters,diskless workstations and centrally managed computers (thin clients) such as public computers atlibraries and schools.

Network booting can be used to centralize management of disk storage, which supporters claim can result in reduced capital and maintenance costs. It can also be used incluster computing, in whichnodes may not have local disks.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s, network boot was used to save the expense of a disk drive, because a decently sized harddisk would still cost thousands of dollars, often equaling the price of theCPU.^{[citation needed]}

Contemporarydesktoppersonal computers generally provide an option to boot from the network in theirBIOS/UEFI via thePreboot Execution Environment (PXE). Post-1998PowerPC (G3 – G5)Mac systems can also boot from theirNew World ROM firmware to a network disk viaNetBoot.^[1] Old personal computers without network boot firmware support can utilize afloppy disk orflash drive containing software to boot from the network.

The initial software to be run is loaded from aserver on the network; forIP networks this is usually done using theTrivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). The server from which to load the initial software is usually found by broadcasting aBootstrap Protocol orDynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) request.^[2] Typically, this initial software is not a full image of the operating system to be loaded, but a small network boot manager program such asPXELINUX which can deploy a boot option menu and then load the full image by invoking the corresponding second-stagebootloader.

Netbooting is also used for unattended operating system installations. In this case, a network-bootedhelper operating system is used as a platform to execute the script-driven, unattended installation of the intended operating system on the target machine. Implementations of this forMac OS X andWindows exist asNetInstall andWindows Deployment Services, respectively.

Before IP became the primaryLayer 3 protocol,Novell'sNetWare Core Protocol (NCP) andIBM'sRemote Initial Program Load (RIPL) were widely used for network booting. Theirclient implementations also fit into smallerROM than PXE. Technically network booting can be implemented over any offile transfer orresource sharing protocols, for example,NFS is preferred byBSD variants.

• Wake-on-LAN (WoL)

• PXE specification – The Preboot Execution Environment specification v2.1 published by Intel & SystemSoft
• Remote Boot Protocol Draft – draft of the PXE Client/Server Protocol included in the PXE specification
• NetBoot – NetBoot 2.0: Boot Server Discovery Protocol (BSDP)

• Network booting
• Computer network technology

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