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

[Robert Arkiletian]

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