I'm using pxelinux in an interesting way, to load DOS boot disk images from a win2k RIS (Remote installation Service) to do various functions. Soem of the disk images are used for flashing the BIOS on pcs, but a specific few are set aside for booting MSDOS with MS lanman so that ghost can be run to load images to/from the lan. I've got 6 different disk images setup and the all work great except for the ones for the 3Com 90x cards. IF i use the disk image in hte floppy, works great, no issues, if I feed that image thru pxelinns/memdisk, when the image begins to boot it creates a ramdrive which it uncompresses data into to startup the LAN, I get the old DOS "Abort Retry ignore" error when attempting to unzip the disk file onto the ramdrive. Hittign retry works and it unzips, but the network driver just hangs the machine at this point. The same disk image booting from floppy works fine, not abort/retry/ignore errors, and the lan starts up I can login and do whatever necessary. This problem ONLY exists on machines using the 3Com 3c9xx cards. (In this case I've tried on Dell GX150/240/260 desktops, and Dell C400 laptops). Our other range of machines usethe Intel E100Pro and its variants and have no problems with the pxe served boot disk and bootup and logon great. Just the 3coms give me trouble. Has anyone seen this? or know how to get around this issue? (using the floppy for all these machines is troublesome as some don't have floppy drives (laptops) and others have floppy disk locks in place._ Thanks... ====Dave J. Andruczyk __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More http://faith.yahoo.com
Just a thought: Have you looked in to the 3Com site and searched for updates to the card's PXE bios? I had that problem 18 months ago with the first Intel cards that came with PXE... -----Original Message----- From: Dave Andruczyk [mailto:djandruczyk at yahoo.com] Sent: Friday, October 18, 2002 12:01 AM To: syslinux at zytor.com Subject: [syslinux] memdisk issues with 3com cards I'm using pxelinux in an interesting way, to load DOS boot disk images from a win2k RIS (Remote installation Service) to do various functions. Soem of the disk images are used for flashing the BIOS on pcs, but a specific few are set aside for booting MSDOS with MS lanman so that ghost can be run to load images to/from the lan. I've got 6 different disk images setup and the all work great except for the ones for the 3Com 90x cards. IF i use the disk image in hte floppy, works great, no issues, if I feed that image thru pxelinns/memdisk, when the image begins to boot it creates a ramdrive which it uncompresses data into to startup the LAN, I get the old DOS "Abort Retry ignore" error when attempting to unzip the disk file onto the ramdrive. Hittign retry works and it unzips, but the network driver just hangs the machine at this point. The same disk image booting from floppy works fine, not abort/retry/ignore errors, and the lan starts up I can login and do whatever necessary. This problem ONLY exists on machines using the 3Com 3c9xx cards. (In this case I've tried on Dell GX150/240/260 desktops, and Dell C400 laptops). Our other range of machines usethe Intel E100Pro and its variants and have no problems with the pxe served boot disk and bootup and logon great. Just the 3coms give me trouble. Has anyone seen this? or know how to get around this issue? (using the floppy for all these machines is troublesome as some don't have floppy drives (laptops) and others have floppy disk locks in place._ Thanks... ====Dave J. Andruczyk __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos & More http://faith.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ SYSLINUX mailing list Submissions to SYSLINUX at zytor.com Unsubscribe or set options at: http://www.zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/syslinux
Dave Andruczyk <djandruczyk at yahoo.com> writes:> I've got 6 different disk images setup and the all work great except > for the ones for the 3Com 90x cards.My suggestion is to have one disk image, not six. There is "universal" DOS NDIS driver which works with any PXE-capable network card, provided the PXE stack is enabled (e.g., if you have booted from the network). The driver is named undis3.dos, and it is included on 3com's MBA utility disk: http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/mba.htm You will need to add "append keeppxe" to your pxelinux.cfg file. (With this driver, you are more likely to be able to use a newly-released Ethernet card with DOS than with any other operating system, including Windows and Linux. I find this oddly amusing.) - Pat P.S. My other suggestion is not to use Ghost, because imaging is a terrible way to deploy machines. For an open source system which does not use imaging, see <http://unattended.sourceforge.net/>. It provides a concrete example for how to use the universal NDIS driver, and the author is a great guy :-).