[K12OSN] HD boot-Format 1722kb floppy on Fedora Core 2

["Terrell Prudé, Jr."]

Actually, all you need is the size of the EtherBoot file itself.  In the 
case of the 3C905 and RealTek 8129, this is 36,864 bytes, or exactly 
36kB.  Yup, kilobytes!  This thing's smaller than DOS 5.0's 
COMMAND.COM.  An old IBM PC-XT hard disk from 1983 would, therefore, be 
way, way overkill for this, and thus, 512MB oughta be enough for 
anybody.  :-D

And I agree; I see no reason why Ghost shouldn't be just peachy for 
this.  Just make sure you do a bit-for-bit copy, since there aren't any 
recognizable filesystems on the disk anymore, and you oughta be fine.

--TP

norbert wrote:

> Hi Terrell,
>
> Very cool solution, however most P-Is don't have a CDROM, would 
> blasting some old HD with the floppy image and then (ghost) copying on 
> to other drives work as well based on the same NIC in place?
> AND how small a hard drive can I use ? ...... got lots of 512MB 
> kicking around...
>
> thks
> norbert
>
> microman at cmosnetworks.com wrote:
>
>> Krsnendu dasa wrote:
>>
>>> I am trying to set up booting from the hard drive on K12LTSP using 
>>> Toms's
>>> boot disk. When I run the install on one of my servers (K12LTSP4.01) 
>>> the
>>> floppies don't verify. I heard some floppy drives/ systems just 
>>> don't work.
>>> So I tried it on another box (K12LTSP 4.1.0) and I get the message 
>>> "Device
>>> not found" Does anyone have advice how to format 1722kb floppies using
>>> Fedora Core 2. This seems to be the sticking point.
>>>
>>> Perhaps there is another way to do this. If there is a 1.44 MB boot 
>>> image
>>> that will allow me to format my HD so I can copy the etherboot image 
>>> that
>>> might be easier. If someone can send an image that I can copy direct 
>>> to 1.44
>>> floppy that would be fantastic! :-)
>>>
>>> Other suggestions welcome.
>>>
>>>
>>> Background: I have been using floppies to boot my client computers 
>>> but have
>>> found them a. unreliable (many floppy disk errors) b. the floppy 
>>> drive is
>>> used up by the boot floppy because c. if the kids take the floppies 
>>> out they
>>> lose them.
>>>
>>> Etherboot BootROM nics are too expensive to get. I already have the 
>>> hard
>>> drives and have no other use for them. I have about 8-9 like this
>>>
>>> My new terminals have PXE on the motherboard NIC. Much easier:>)
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>
>> 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
>> _____________________ 
>