[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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