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Re: [LUG] PXE Bootable Network cards

 

Richard Brown wrote:

>Hi Theo
>
>On Wednesday 30 August 2006 15:33, Theo Zourzouvillys wrote:
>  
>
>>Pretty much all intel nic's do, most realtacks do, too
>>    
>>
>I think I asked the wrong question. I know the cards support them but I can't 
>actually get hold of the boot rom that goes on a card!
>
>Thanks though.
>  
>
There are :-
Network cards with no boot rom support.
Network cards with boot rom support (but no chip) usually signified by 
an empty chip holder on the card
and Network cards with built in boot roms.

For the ones with boot roms, depending on the age they may support PXE 
properly or not.

The old 3com cards that I salvage for LTSP projects by default have boot 
roms but they need patching to work properly. 3com provide DOS programs 
to do this patching as the cards have build in flash hardware.

On top of this, depending on the age of the BIOS on the motherboard, it 
may not properly support hand over to the boot rom, although I have not 
encountered this problem yet.

If your card does not support a boot rom chip or you havent got a boot 
rom burner  and boot roms, then you can use a floppy or lilo image that 
will boot just like a normal floppy / hard disk.

These images can be obtained from rom-o-matic:   http://rom-o-matic.net

and they work just fine with K12LTSP and as far as I know any distro 
using the LTSP package.

Hope this helps.

Tom.


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