Help me boot to Netboot.me on Windows box with only bootable floppy

[PaulFXH]

I am not an ardent Windows user and would consider my Windows skills
to be little better than rudimentary.
Happily, we want to install Linux to dual boot with Windows on one
computer which has two CD drives. Unfortunately, none is bootable but
there is a bootable floppy drive.
So, I followed the Getting Started guide for booting from a floppy,
downloaded netbootme.dsk and then burned it to a newly formatted
floppy using Unetbootin (Windows version downloaded).
So, with the floppy in the drive, I booted and, sure enough, the
Unetbootin menu showed up. However, that's as far as it got. The only
boot option (default), just kept going back to the "Automatic boot in
10 seconds".
Is there anything I'm overlooking here?

[Nick Johnson]

Hi Paul,

I haven't yet straightened out all the wrinkles regarding using unetbootin, since I don't have a windows machine to use as a test platform. In the meantime, your best option is either:
- Download http://static.netboot.me/gpxe/netbootme.lkrn and set it as the 'kernel' argument in unetbootin
- If that doesn't work, get dd for windows and use it to write the .dsk image directly to the floppy disk.

-Nick

[PaulFXH]

Hi Nick
Thank you for the reply.
The first option you suggested (Unetbootin) didn't work for me.
Although the bootable floppy was created, it failed during the boot
because of a lack of initrd image.
But, the "dd for Windows" option worked great.
Unfortunately, when I booted to this floppy, no network devices were
found.
Next, as you had suggested for my EeePC 901, I enabled the Onboard LAN
Rom.
This time, the netboot failed as usual because of lack of boot
filename. However, unlike on the EeePC, no network devices were found
when the floppy took over.
I presume this means that whatever network driver was left by the PXE
bootloader, didn't get on so well with the bootloader on the floppy.
When the netboot attempt bailed out, what appeared on the screen was:
"Loading ROM
Image.......................................................
gPXE Initializing devices............."
and there it stayed. I left it for up to 30 minutes but nothing
changed.
The network card on this computer is a SiS190.
One difference I've noticed from the EeePC experience is that, when
netbooting, no opportunity to configure the SiS1901 PXE Boot ROM
appears whereas I had to change a couple of parameters in the Atheros
Boot ROM device before it worked on the EeePC. I'll investigate this.
Any more cards in the sleeve?

On Sep 11, 4:07 am, Nick Johnson <arach...@notdot.net> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> I haven't yet straightened out all the wrinkles regarding using unetbootin,
> since I don't have a windows machine to use as a test platform. In the
> meantime, your best option is either:

> - Downloadhttp://static.netboot.me/gpxe/netbootme.lkrnand set it as the

[Thomas Miletich]

Hi
I can't help you with your windows issues, sorry.
I may be able to help you with your sis190 problem though.

I started a port of the linux sis190 driver to gPXE. It will still
take a while to get mainline ready, but I successfully tested booting
linux from gPXE, loading pxelinux and booting linux or booting over
iSCSI.
If you're interested in early testing I can send you the code and a
netboot.me image containing the driver.

Currently I'm busy with other things, but I hope I'll be able to
continue development of the driver next week.

PS: do you have the 100MBit or GBit version of the card?

Thomas

[Nick Johnson]

'fraid I'm drawing a blank. You really do seem to be cursed with unsupported hardware. :/

-Nick

[PaulFXH]

@Thomas Miletich
Thank you. Yes, I am interested in testing whatever image you want to
provide.
My card is a SiS190 100/10 which sure sounds like a 100M bit device.

@Nick Johnson
Cursed, maybe, but it certainly makes life more interesting :)

On Sep 11, 10:09 am, Nick Johnson <arach...@notdot.net> wrote:

> > > - Downloadhttp://static.netboot.me/gpxe/netbootme.lkrnandset it as the

[PaulFXH]

Just to mention that a few days ago I received from Thomas Miletich a
version of gpxe.dsk which allows me to boot to Netboot,me from a
floppy disk on my AMD64 computer with SiS190 card.
So, this problem is solved.

> > > > - Downloadhttp://static.netboot.me/gpxe/netbootme.lkrnandsetit as the