I have a ibm 8364 thin client with a 10 gig hdd attached to it i want to turn into a network server.

It doesnt want to boot from the cdrom attached on the slave, and i dont have compact flash card to boot from. The only way for booting is via the hard drive or via the network card.

I would like to do a hard drive boot, but i havent installed the OS yet. How can i get debian onto it? I use linux daily but havent had the experience before to do this. I heard about putting linux on the hard drive temporarily to boot it up with netinst but debian's documentation is very sparse in that chapter.

Does anyone have detailed or decent instructions on how to approach this?

Cheers.