I had to reload the most ridiculous laptop at work today. First, it refused to network boot, which I discovered was due to its network card being dead. I then tried to boot from DVD to reload it. Refused to boot to the Windows 7 disc. I thought maybe the drive was bad, but it boots just fine and dandy to every other disc I put in it.
So I dig out our USB Ethernet adapter and try to boot with that. No luck. I finally got the thing to boot with a Clonezilla disc, using the USB network adapter to image it over the network. Only found one downside. The adapter is only 10/100… We usually image using gigabit ethernet. When it started, it was going to take over 4 hours to image! It hadn’t finished yet when I left work today.