Getting THinstaion machies to boot from on old PC's

[tosca925]

Leading off from my other post here I have another problem with booting certain computers into Thinstation. After followings RIcs instruction i get 30 working fine. I have another 16 of differnet hardware spec and they fail to boot wiith the Etherboot disk. But if i use an anywhere TS boot disk these 16 PC's boot fine. Is there a way i can install Ether boot to the HDD(tp partion and format) and then copy the files from the AnywhereTS boot disk to the partiton so they boot?

 

Now i have no idea when it comes to Linux, i have tried reading the anywhereTS files on the floppy but windows tells me the disk needs formatting. I try to copy the contents of A: to the HD from DOS and that fails.

 

Can any one help me please?

[Geoff]

1. Grab Linux live CD of some description and boot one of these machines with it.

 

2. Observe which drivers are used. (Hint: the 'lsmod' command will tell you what modules a Linux system has loaded. 'dmesg' will list the boot time messages.)

 

3. Build a new thinstation image using the same drivers.

[Ric_]

@Geoff: It's not the thinstation build, it's the Etherboot build from what I can tell.

[Geoff]

Ok, well then trying a rom-o-matic boot disk might be worth while then.

 

http://rom-o-matic.net/

[CyberNerd]

This doesn't sound like an issue with the thinstation drivers if they are failing to boot with the etherboot disk. Probably the etherboot disk doesn''t have teh correct driver. Try the rom-o-matic method select the correct drivers for the nic. Save the floppy image, and use a linux boot cd or rawwrite to copy to floppy. test thinstation will boot from the floppy and then image the floppy to a hard disk.

[Ric_]

If you do just want to use the working floppy, I think that booting from a Knoppix disk and using something like the dd command to copy the floppy to the hard disk will work. I'm not 100% on the syntax so maybe somebody else can assist?

[CyberNerd]

 dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda 

 

will do a direct byte for byte copy of a floppy drive to the first master hard disk.

[tosca925]

Still need to get round to trying this, may be a Easter Hold job.

 

Thanks for the help guys.