[syslinux] m$windows guy needs pxedisk/memdisk help

[Christian Marg]

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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outdated or otherwise ugly.)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
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