hello and thanks for reading this, i am doing a volunteer project for a school in harlem,ny. they have had donated 30 nics computers from thinknic.com. it can pxe boot. it had a cdrom and it has no hard drive. i am looking for ways to boot windows98 on these machines. i read on some site that memdisk can be used on legacy os. before i spend days testing it out, is it possible to boot windows98 instead of linux. any advice, i have a long weekend and would love to launch something in my vmware virtual machine is use as a test machine. why windows: 1. the school deals with handicapped students using some custom program that only runs on windows. 2. i am learning more about linux all the time and i am willing to use any solution that is free for the school.] 3. the idea of having the source code even though i will never recompile it,is cool. i am computer programmer. 4. thinknic.com no longer makes the product and they will not support it. i cannot even find out who makes the motherboard so i can upgrade the bios. 5. i know mswindows real well. 6. want to integrate linux, step by step into my tool kit. thanks, dave
David Meltzer wrote:> hello and thanks for reading this, > i am doing a volunteer project for a school in harlem,ny. > they have had donated 30 nics computers from thinknic.com. > it can pxe boot. it had a cdrom and it has no hard drive. > > i am looking for ways to boot windows98 on these machines. > i read on some site that memdisk can be used on legacy os. > > before i spend days testing it out, is it possible to boot windows98 instead of linux.You might be able to, but it's far from certain -- Win98 is a protected-mode OS and many of them get confused when they find no hardware behind the BIOS. On the other hand, Win95/98 did actually do INT 13h, I believe, so it just might actually work. Also, you'd have to have lots of RAM since MEMDISK resides permanently in memory, at least up to the point where you can mount a file server. -hpa
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 David Meltzer wrote:> i am doing a volunteer project for a school in harlem,ny. > they have had donated 30 nics computers from thinknic.com. > it can pxe boot. it had a cdrom and it has no hard drive. > > i am looking for ways to boot windows98 on these machines. > i read on some site that memdisk can be used on legacy os.Take a look at http://www.nelliott.demon.co.uk/distributed/windows_diskless/how_to_build.html it describes how to build a Win98 diskless setup. He uses a floppy disk to boot the stuff. (Use with Care. The networking Bit seems to be a bit outdated or otherwise ugly.) General approach seems to be: Use Drivespace to build a Volume and install Windows98 to it. Then copy the Volume to "Server" and use Network Drive Mapping to boot Windows from it. You'll probably need to build a DOS Boot floppy supporting "Windows Networking" (aka SMB or Samba). You can use the DOS Lanman Client for that. Get it from ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/Clients/msclient/ or perhaps ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/Clients/lanman/ They both should work. You simply install it on your Dos machine, walk through the setup and then try to pry it onto a 1.44mb Disk. (Delete some things, compress others). Drivespace might not be the worst idea... For any solution booting via Floppy disk you can of course substitute PXELINUX and MEMDISK. Since you need some kind of a server for the diskless Stations anyway, that Server could also be serving DHCP and TFTP (don't think you actually needed a PXE-Server for booting PXE-NICs) This could of course be some Linux machine, but one could also do it on some recent Windows machine (It'd better be 2000 or greater. Don't think that using lesser Versions makes much sense... Some might even say using any Windows as a server makes no sense...) I'll leave you alone now. Hope you can get it to work... ;) bye Christian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+zrKR2gF1h3CVOsMRAt0EAKDoks9zxCYX4AoMemG4UKQkrWSu3QCg6Y6r zbtNjH0ccMd/epq5c6elDsM=dI2m -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 David Meltzer wrote:> they have had donated 30 nics computers from thinknic.com. > it can pxe boot. it had a cdrom and it has no hard drive.Do they have a reasonable amount of RAM? If so, you could install it into a disk image and load that via memdisk. Then you'd not need to work out a dos based Samba enabled bootdisk... Of course you can alway use the cdrom. I think someone on our site has managed to run Win98 from cdrom. Don't know what he did... bye Christian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+zrXP2gF1h3CVOsMRAjOWAKC5O1vaB1kOcaj7u9QURLnIdZ58fQCfb0Bo 1+VcQNLVS393s6QArljN8Nk=qrBw -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----