A system for and method of network booting of an operating system (O/S) on one or more client devices, such as personal computers (PC's), employing a hibernation image. Remote booting of sets of client devices is facilitated by employing virtual disk emulation and, in certain preferred embodiments, broadcasting or multicasting of data residing on a network server which is necessary to appropriately boot and configure the one or more client devices, the data including hibernation, O/S and application files.