This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help.
Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it:
sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment
Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........
It has been a big pain for a long-time to install Windows from a Linux environment. I used to run a windows install server and it never worked right for some reason (the install would fail on most servers).
Before getting start be sure to setup your samba share so once you boot into WinPE you can mount the install for whatever Windows you want
/etc/samba/smb.conf
[smbwinstall]
path = /tftpboot/images/winstall
guest ok = yes........
*Update so this doesn't work it must be something to do with the path of nfs or something else but the installer fails with "Installer crashed" at the end whereas with the CD/USB it works.
This assumes you've already installed and configured a separate PXE/DHCP server somewhere else and your /tftpboot directory is setup.
This is for Linux Mint 18.1 but generally applies to most versions although you may have tro change things like "casper"........
Thsi is very handy when doing your own kernel development.
-m specifies how much ram (in the example it is 768MB)
-kernel specifies the path to the kernel file
-net tap,ifname=tap1,script=no (the ifname=tap1 is what you need to change and setup manually).
*Run "tunctl -b" to create a tap device and use the one it gives you for ifname=
Enable networking to the outside like this:
*Note we assume that your bridge is br0 i........
This is something I often setup for clients because it's very helpful for people in datacenters, this allows custom OS installs on demand, you can customize it more by using kickstart etc.. but here's a base I use before customizing more:
This little script below will install everything you need to get booting by PXE Linux.
It also assumes you set a local IP (be sure not to overwrite your existing IP) on eth0:0 (note the :0) as 192.168.1.10 and it........