What is booting from LAN and how does it work?

Question

Want boot from LAN so I can use a shared Drive on a network to format my Laptop

Answer 1

The Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE, aka Pre-Execution Environment, or 'pixie') is an environment to boot computers using a network interface independently of available data storage devices (like hard disks) or installed operating systems.

Answer 2

I think ghost may be the only commercial program that still does that, there are probably some freeware/linux variants out there also.  It loads bare bones network drivers (ndis) and you connect to a pxe server that delivers the operating system as an image file to the hard drive.