I have never gotten into booting from networks, so I am not sure what is possible. Right now I have a laptop and a computer with an extra hard drive. I want to put linux on that extra hard drive, however boot it from the laptop. Im not sure how this works or if it is even possible, but this would be an ideal solution for me. Thanks

PXE ??? - never used it, but I've seen it mentioned in the grub manual.
Googleshould find plenty.

Hey android6011, I just stumbled across this, might provide you with some insight:

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817...hm8o5nb?a=view

so im still a little confused about how to go about doing this. One of my questions is can I boot from the spare drive on the extra computer when the extra computer is running Windows? I dont want to actually install and run linux, just store the fs on the extra drive.

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.

That depends on whether Windows has bootp, tftp, dhcp, and nfs services. Personally, I'd recommend doing all this on a Linux box!

i cant find a guide that shows how to go through the process of setting this up, are there any recommended ones? I plan on adding debian to the extra hard drive, so that i can boot it from my laptop

I recently made a little guide to kicking of a CentOS installation via netboot. It might help you.

The question is do you want to boot completely diskless system, or just load the kernel over the network? Ifthe latter, my guide should help get you started. If the former, you might want to look at this page. One problem is that although you can run a TFTP and DHCP server on any platform, I'm not sure if there are any good Windows NFS servers that are free (there are ones you can buy, I think) and I'm not sure if Linux can use SMBFS as a root filesystem.

I want the second, I want no part of the file system on my laptop, i want it all on the extra hd, nothing but what is required for me to load the os over the network on my laptop