You may wish to boot an LTSP client without the need of any removable media, but your network card does not support PXE. For these situations, you may wish to use a harddrive to boot the Etherboot image to set the LTSP boot process in motion. Luckily, this can be accomplished pretty easily.

Necessary Material

• Functioning LTSP server
• Client PC with a harddrive and CDROM drive
• KNOPPIX CD
• Rom-o-matic image for your network card

Getting the Rom-O-Matic Image

From the latest version available on http://www.rom-o-matic.net, select the appropriate network card type, and choose LILO/GRUB/SYSLINUX loadable kernel format (.zlilo) as the ROM output format. NB: if you want to use the generic driver for all NIC's, you might want to try Etherboot version 5.2.5. Version 5.2.6 did not work for me, though the previous version worked fine. YMMV.

Method using LILO

Boot the client using the KNOPPIX CD. You can boot it into runlevel 2 (a GUI is not necessary for this procedure). Begin by clearing the first section of the harddisk: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M count=5

Then, partition the disk using cfdisk. You only need one partition: you can make it the whole disk or only a few megabytes. You just need it to hold a few temporary files. Once you have made the partition, format it with the ext2 filesystem and mount it as follows.

mke2fs /dev/hda1
mkdir -p /mnt/hda1
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Copy the rom-o-matic image you made to /mnt/hda1 using a floppy disk or a network utility such as scp.

Now, create a lilo.conf file in /mnt/hda1 with this content:

lba32
boot = /dev/hda
map = /mnt/hda1/.map
install = /mnt/hda1/boot-menu.b
image = /mnt/hda1/eb-5.X.Y-VERSION.zlilo # Replace with the correct path to your etherboot file
   label=LTSP

Now run lilo -v -C /mnt/hda1/lilo.conf -s /mnt/hda1/backup - that should install the etherboot code as a LILO image to the MBR of your harddrive. Reboot, and you should be good to go.

-- PatrickMcDonnell - 24 Apr 2005

Method copying floppy image on hard drive

Get a floppy image for your ethernet card. Newer versions of etherboot do not work this way, but at least 5.0.7 works. Just excecute on a running linux machine, knoppix-booted linux or in a linux rescue console the following

cat file.name.of.your.boot.floppy.zdsk > /dev/hda

where hda is the hard drive you are adding etherboot. Caution, you may trash information from another hard drive, if you misspell drive name. hda is primary master, hdb primary slave and so on. This way, you just copy over the beginning of the hard drive with etherboot. Partition table and all partitions are removed, but a terminal does not need a hard drive for storage anyway. Later, configure from bios setup the hard drive timeout to 1 minute and after booting the machine is again quiet.

Method using Wizzy Toms Root Boot Disk

I like the method used by the Wizzy Toms Root Boot Disk. It is an altered version of the Tom's Root Boot Disk that will put a copy of LILO and the Universal Boot ROM on the computer, no matter if the hard drive already has an OS on it or not. More details at http://www.wizzy.org.za/article/articlestatic/14/1/2/ along with the floppy image needed to create the file.

(NOTE: I am not affiliated with Wizzy, just like the product)

Related topics

• Etherboot
• DHCP