Subject: How does a PC boot from floppy?
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Steven Grunza <grunza@ulticom.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 10/12/1999 12:23:43
Hi,
  I'm thinking of creating a boot floppy for some of the systems around
here.  They are large memory (128+ MB) Pentium+ machines with Win95,
Win98, and WinNT on them.  I'd like to run them diskless without a swap,
thus avoiding any changes to their local drives.  To do this, I would
need to boot from floppy with a floppy that handled:

1) Reverse ARP to determine IP address
2) TFTP to get kernel
3) The kernel would need to know how to do NFS mounts of all needed file
systems.

It seems that most of this code should already exist in some form or
another.  Does any one have a suggestion as to where to find the
documentation on how to do this?  I've checked the
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/netboot/intro.i386.html
page.  The systems don't support BIOS netbooting.  More information on
the netboot.com program might be all I need.  Thanks for any and all who
can help.




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Steven Grunza				Hardware Engineer
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