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From: Marty C. <md...@th...> - 2001-01-17 02:18:35
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On 1/16/2001 2:41 PM Eno Compton Eno...@Mi... wrote:
>We have a custom pc with a pcmcia flash card and no floppy. The flash card
>appears to the computer as hard drive d: To test the etherboot, I wrote the
>driver and the boot to a floppy on another computer, copied the first 64k
>from the floppy to the flash card and started testing.
>The floppy boots fine ... on floppy equipped machines which made me think
>this would be easy. But ...
This won't work because a floppy image is designed to load from the
floppy drive.
>The flash has a problem. The first sector from the flash gets read in and
>executed ok. But the code that comes from the flash attempts to read the
>rest of the loader from floppy. Looking at the source, it seems clear, the
>boot sector code just assumes it comes from diskette on drive a and that it
>should get the rest of the code from the same place.
>Can anyone suggest how I can get past this problem?
Sure. Etherboot is quite flexible about what it will boot from. So far
we have: Floppy, ROM, lilo, and DOS (.COM file) working.
What you want to do first is to make your Flash bootable. You can do
that in a number of ways, depending on what operating system you plan to
use.
Try this:
- Run FDISK and make a DOS partition on D:
- FORMAT /S D:
- Make a DOS .COM Executable file by telling Etherboot something like:
cd src
make bin32/rtl8139.com
(substitute your rom type for "rtl8139")
or you can download one from http://rom-o-matic.net/ by choosing
"DOS .COM Executable" from the ROM type menu.
- copy your .com file to drive D:
- add a line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS file to run your .COM
file on startup.
If drive D: is bootable, and your BIOS will let you boot from it, it
should start DOS, and run Etherboot, which should execute and do what you
want.
Another way to use this is to use the SYSLINUX package, which sort of
does the same thing, except it makes the partition on the flash bootable.
Using SYSLINUX you would still create a FAT (dos) filesystem on the
flash, and wouldn't need DOS. You would hand SYSLINUX an Etherboot image
(which is make with:
cd src
make bin32/rtl8129.lzlilo
or you can get one from http://rom-o-matic.net/
Hopefully that will get you going. Let us know how it goes...
Regards,
Marty
---
Try: http://rom-o-matic.net/ to make Etherboot images instantly.
Name: Martin D. Connor
US Mail: Entity Cyber, Inc.; P.O. Box 391827; Cambridge, MA 02139; USA
Voice: (617) 491-6935, Fax: (617) 491-7046
Email: md...@th...
Web: http://www.thinguin.org/
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