Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 13:53:13 -0800 From: Robert Clark <ROBERTC@PII.COM> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it, mfwong@mol.net.my Subject: I do a similar thing here, automaticly, using one floppy. Message-ID: <s2b94b8f.055@pii.com>
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I do a similar thing here, automaticly, using one floppy. 1st boot (From a DOS bootable floppy.) run a macro against pfdisk, setting up a standard partition run a:\boot.com 2nd boot (from same DOS bootable floppy) attach to fileserver (your choice) or other source of image run a macro against DIMAGE to copy OS of your choice to HD run a:\boot.com I don't use a FreeBSD server to hold the image, but using XFS (a pcnfs workalike) it would be easy to use FreeBSD to hold the image. W95 can supposedly be run diskless, but using RPL and the NDIS stuff. [RC] >>> Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> 12/19/96 11:49am >>> > I learnt that FreeBSD can be set up to be diskless client. However, I wonder > if anyone > know if one can use FreeBSD as the boot server and run netboot.com or > netboot.rom > equivalent for Win95 ? I guess this question can be generalized to other OS > as well. I have gone through this, and after much work, reading books and browsing on the network was unable to make Win95 work decently in a diskless configuration without using IPX. What we managed to do was a "minimal" image which would contain the files needed for Win95 to boot and see the network (and a zillion of other probably useless files that we were unable to dispose). This image is a ~15MB ZIP archive. We boot FreeBSD, run a special /etc/rc which uses fdisk&mtools to cleanup the HD, make a bootable MSDOS partition, copy this archive to the disk, then reboots this time from the disk; the ZIP archive is exploded, and a third reboot makes your machine work. You could probably save the second reboot if there were a working vfatfs (or a version of mtools supporting recursive copy). Totally unsatisfactory. As for the generalization to other OSs: if your OS requires loading a thousand files before your network of choice (IP in our case) is in a usable state, you're out of luck. With MSDOS some netboot equivalents that I know of download an image of a floppy which contains all the files you need. Luigi -----------------------------+-------------------------------------- Luigi Rizzo | Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it | Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 | via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 | http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ _____________________________|______________________________________
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