[K12OSN] HD boot-Format 1722kb floppy on Fedora Core 2
Robert Arkiletian
robark at telus.net
Sat Oct 9 23:39:19 UTC 2004
Terrell Prudé, Jr. wrote:
>
> There is indeed another way to do this (gotta love Free Software!). I
> have a couple of 32MB Pentium I terminals here that boot to K12LTSP
> from the hard disk. My NICs are 3Com 3C905 and Realtek 8129. No
> floppy needed for these babies. :-) Basically, you simply cat the
> EtherBoot floppy to your hard disk. Here's how I did it.
>
> Make your EtherBoot boot floppy. Grab something like Damn Small Linux
> (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org) and burn the ISO image to a CD-R.
> Boot your terminal with it. D.S.L. has actually been shown to allow
> GUI access in 16MB DRAM on a 486!!
> (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/486.html) Of course, I would recommend
> no less than 32MB on the clients.
>
> Once you're booted, pop your EtherBoot boot floppy in and do this:
>
> root at box# cat /dev/fd0 /dev/hda
>
> What this will do is copy the contents of your EtherBoot floppy right
> to the hard disk, starting from Sector 0,0,1, thus over-writing your
> MBR and partition table (kiss that Windows 95 installation goodbye!
> :-D ). Your computer will from then on boot from the EtherBoot code
> every time, just like from a really, Really, REALLY fast, HUUUUUGE
> "boot floppy." The above command assumes an IDE disk, since that
> tends to describe most older 486/Pentiums. For SCSI disks, just
> replace "/dev/hda" with "/dev/sda"; D.S.L. correctly recognized my
> Adaptec 2930U, even though there's nothing on it. Of course all of
> this assumes that you have only one disk drive of any sort in the box,
> or if there's also a CD-ROM drive, that the hard disk (if IDE) is the
> primary master; CD-ROMs should ideally be the secondary master, if
> present.
>
> HTH,
>
> --TP
Terrel,
This is a super simple solution if you don't need the HD for anything
else except to boot the client. I vote this gets put in to the wiki.
Couldn't you also do this using Tom's Root Boot?
BTW I also had problems making Tom's Root Boot so I did it at home on
Slackware and it worked.
Robert Arkiletian
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