Hi, I have a couple of older PCs that I would like to use as diskless Linux clients. They have a BootManage TCP/IP BOOT-PROM from a company named bootix , formerly Incom GmbH. As far as I understand, this is pre-PXE and has various options to boot a PC. Especially, it can start a boot image (specifically created from a DOS boot disk) or start another boot loader (via a special boot image named BPBOOT). There is plenty of documentation and software for TCP/IP BOOT-PROM at http://www.bootix.com/download/download_en.html.
I would like to start GRUB via the TCP/IP BOOT-PROM to profit from GRUB's configurability and flexibility, but have not managed to do so. I would appreciated any suggestions on what to do or try. Here is what if have tried so far. As I know little to nothing about boot loaders, some of these attempts probably look pretty stupid to the expert's eye. Using the TCP/IP BOOT-PROM to boot an image created form a FAT GRUB boot floppy runs into a "GRUB Hard Disk Error". May be GRUB is unable to determine the size of the RAM disk it is running from? Same error occurs when using stage1 as the boot image. Using an adapter in front of stage2 (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2005-09/msg00033.html) to make GRUB look like a linux kernel halts the machine or produces garbage after an initial promising "Linux" (with BPBATCH, see below). BPBATCH, as described in the Linux Remote-Boot HowTo, can be used to boot Linux with a TCP/IP BOOT-PROM. I successfully booted an old RedHat 7.2 kernel, but failed with SuSE 2.4 or 2.6 ("Direct booting from floppy is no longer supported. Please use a boot loader") kernels. The TCP/IP BOOT-PROM boot image format seems to be different from those used by Netboot and PXE. I ran into various errors trying nbgrub and pxegrub or images created with mknbi. According to bootix, it should be possible to use the image of a DOS boot disk with loadlin and a Linux kernel. I have not tried this. The image size is limited to 2,880 kb and preparing multiple image(s) is rather tedious and not very flexible. So, how do I run GRUB from the BootManage TCP/IP BOOT-PROM?. Thanks, Malte _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list Bug-grub@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub