[K12OSN] using really old PCs as clients

j.w. thomas jthomas at bittware.com
Wed Oct 14 18:50:49 UTC 2009


Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
> Also remember that even though the floppy drives aren't working, you can 
> accomplish the same thing with the hard disk instead.  What I do in this 
> case is pull the old box's hard disk out of it, install it in another 
> GNU/Linux or other UNIX-style box, and then "cat" the Rom-O-Matic image 
> to the hard disk, like so.  This example is for the 3Com 3C905 series, 
> and it assumes the old box's hard disk shows up as /dev/hdb.
> 
>   terrell at thinclientmaker$ su - root
>   Password:  (enter root's password here)
>   root at thinclientmaker# cat eb-5.4.4-3c90x.zdsk > /dev/hdb
>   root at thinclientmaker# halt
> 
> Then, just pop this new "EtherBoot hard disk" back into the old box and 
> boot from it.  If you set up one box to do all your old hard disks this 
> way, it goes pretty quickly.  I did something similar with some EIDE Sun 
> Ultra 5 hard disks a few years back (I used an x86 machine for the 
> cat'ing), and I had ten hard disks all config'd in about 20 minutes.
> 

It would be really sweet to have a LiveCD that did this for you.  With 
appropriate warnings!

-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas at bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com    (603) 226-0404 x536
When you have a new hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.




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