Yes, it's posssible, and quite easy in fact, though there are several stages involved, and the initial boot process has changed from 2.4 (initrd) to 2.6 (initramfs).
The first stage is to get a bootloader running. You'll need either BIOS support for network booting or a trusty old floppy with pxegrub on it. There are other solutions of course, but I've only used grub. One handy advantage of grub is that you can download the menu.lst over the network, so you need minimal configuration at boot time (in the case of a floppy boot, you should never need to update the floppy even if you change the kernel etc).
Next, you need a kernel configured for network booting (dhcp/nfs must be compile in etc).
On the server, you need tftp (to download the kernel), dhcp to configure eth0, and nfs to mount /. The inital dowload of pxegrub requires the bootp protocol, the dhcp daemon can handle this too.
There should be a few HOWTOs about network booting on tldp.
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One of my questions is can I boot from the spare drive on the extra computer when the extra computer is running Windows?
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That depends on whether Windows has bootp, tftp, dhcp, and nfs services. Personally, I'd recommend doing all this on a Linux box!