I have a Acer L5100 which is not so quiet. I'd like to experiment with pulling out the hard-drive and making the computer boot over lan from a server I have.

It has Vista Home Premium installed.

Is this possible, and can anyone point me towards resources regarding this?

Hi,

Is the hard drive the loudest/only source of noise?

Hey,

I have done this with Windows XP using the gPXE bootloader, the WinAoE ATA over Ethernet client, booting from LAN from a Linux machine running vblade, the ATA over Ethernet target. Not sure about Vista support, you will have to look into it.

Start here:

http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php

It will take you some time to figure everything out, but there is a helpful mailing list and IRC channel.

Good luck! If you have any questions, you can ask here too.

Thanks man. I'll definitely look into it in a few weeks. Could be a nice project for the holidays. It looked like something that takes a bit more then 15 minutes.

Why don't you just get a new, quiet HDD? Maybe a 2.5" like this one?

It just struck me:
I have a fairly fast memorystick.
Why not install Ubuntu on it, and ditch the HDD? I use the computer for streaming video from a lan server, so the I/O is not really important for its primary use.

In that case, the url you want is http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

But believe me, it's quite satisfying when you get the LAN booting working. Windows booting from a RAM disk over Gigabit Ethernet is nice and speedy

Yea why not indeed? Thats what I do, and it works great! I hear a non-journaled filesystem is the best for this so I stuck with EXT2.

My Mum's L5100 ain't that loud at all, however changing the orientation does change the perceived noise. I have found that mounting it on the side with the rubber feet makes it seem less noisy.

If that doesn't work, and the computer is still in warranty (and you have backed up your data), run the factory restore utility until it fails (or make it fail). Call up acer moan about the hdd being faulty and it failing midway through an image. Acer will take it back and stick a brand new hdd in with your sw image.
Chances are, the new hdd will be lot quieter than the old hdd and thus solving your problem.

The above paragraph is based on my experience where a re-image did fail and I got a brand new Seagate hdd, that was quieter than the Hitachi one it came with (mad isn't it!)

Thanks for all the replies.

I tried different versions of Linux, but it seems none of the worked well with the built in ATI gfx card. So I got a Mtron 3500 32 GIG and I'm really pleased with the result. Highly recommended.