Boot across a network?

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Boot across a network?
started by: SaidinUnleashed

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on July 14 2004,23:51

Okay, here's the deal.

I have an old laptop (a Toshiba Satellite Pro 240CDS) that the CD drive has died on. It has no USBs and putting a new CD-ROM in it is a bit cost prohibitive, meaning I'm cheap and don't want to put any money into the P.O.S. laptop.

It has Wondow$ 98 Second Edition - Demo Edition on it (which is CRAP) and I want to put DSL onto it.

I know that I could chop the ISO image into 50 or so floppy disk size pieces, but I'm waaay too lazy for that. What I'd like to do, is to boot up another old desktop that already has DSL on it and boot the laptop over the LAN.

You know, toss in a boot disk and have it boot from the desktop across the network.

So, basically, 2 questions.

First, is this possible with the current version of DSL?

And if not, what would it take to make it possible?

If it's not currently possible with DSL, then maybe John can one day cram it into that almost 1 meg that he shrunk the distro from 0.7.1 to 0.7.2. ^_^

Posted by cbagger01 on July 15 2004,01:39

Network booting is theoretically possible but is not supported out-of-the-box.

However, there are a couple of other ways that you can get DSL on to this laptop.

One way is to connect it up to another Windows computer on the LAN. Stick the DSL cd into the CDROM and then share the CDROM drive using Windows network sharing. Then copy the contents of the CDROM over to your root directory, IE: C:\

You should then have a C:\KNOPPIX directory with some stuff in it.

Next step is to create a boot floppy. Follow the instructions on the web site. You may need to download a program called rawrite.exe from the internet if you want to create the boot floppy from a Windows or MSDOS prompt.

Stick in the boot floppy and turn on your laptop. It will see the C:\KNOPPIX directory and think that your C:\ partition is a CDROM disk and DSL will then boot up for you.

Another option is to use the network download script that roberts put together. See this topic for details:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....roberts >