[syslinux] memdisk issues with 3com cards

Luis.F.Correia Luis.F.Correia at seg-social.pt
Fri Oct 18 00:29:15 PDT 2002


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

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