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In short, a workstation can boot from a variety of methods - via Floppy Disk , local physical disk or other media - or via the network. At boot time, a workstation has been set to boot primarily from PXE will issue a BOOTP request via the network. BOOTP and DHCP are closely related - a workstation sends a request for a 2nd level TCP/IP unique identifier (IP address) based on the machines MAC Address , a unique number based on two parts - a manufacturer code and a unique number.

Once recieved, a BOOTP server will not only supply the IP Address to the machine, but enable booting from remote media. In this case, the Microsoft RIS server will issue a floppy disk boot image, which can then be used to fetch either a system image file, from a third party system such as Symantec Ghost or Acronis TrueImage .

Following execution, the system will configure itself based on this information and will allow the system to boot as if a floppy disk was inserted. Following the use of a third party imaging solution, it is necessary to either directly alter the registry to change the system's unique ID, the SID , or using the sysprep utility from Microsoft, the system will re-run the final configuration of an installation - which generates a unique SID and if required, will join a Windows domain.

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