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Network booting for win2k?

M

Mandrill

Golden Member
Can it be done to make a diskless system? I am thinking of building a small crack rack for Dpad and I'd like to do it for as little expense as possible. If I could avoid buying Hard Drives, that would save me some money. Can it be done?
 
so you are talking about having no hard drive at all in the computer and just running the operating system off a hard drive on the network? i have never heard of this being successfully done. ive heard of linux being run off a floppy only but never any kind of windows os running off anything other than a hard drive physically inside a pc. if this can be done i sure would like to know how!
 
Yes... actually it can - but you'd likely need to use a network-ready Win98 boot disk. I've seen them, and in fact I think Garry was working on it.

Essentially - it's a stripped-down win98 boot disk with network adapter drivers. It then maps to an appropriate network drive, and runs the command-line client. You'd need a seperate folder for each node, but other than that - it'd be fairly straightforward -- and quite doable. 🙂
 
Obviously - it needs to be tested prior to going to alot of trouble. I *believe* this will work - but it's all theoretical since I've done nothing with it. 🙂
 
I've tried doing this with a floppy, creating a ramdisk...it worked great...mapped drives...started muon...but the only prob is...dpad doen't run in dos! 🙁 So back to no where...
 
Originally posted by: Confused
Originally posted by: DanC
Might give this one a go...
Click to expand...

All well and good, providing the project you wish to use can be run in DOS.


Pure DOS, not a command window from Windows. Proper DOS.


Garry
Click to expand...


I've seen a win32 cmd program thingy for dos on the 'net at one point. I thought, hey, it might be a good idea to bookmark this, as I knew people would want it(including me)...but, alas, I've wiped the HD since then...all I can remember is that it was on one of the webpages of one of the programs referenced to on tinyapps.org, and had a black background...

I know this probably isn't much help, but, know it CAN be done, as I did test it.

EDIT: I was browsing the links at tinyapps.org looking for it, and...I FOUND IT!
the website is:
DosUser main page

just go down to the WinEm 1.00 program. I think that that just might work for you.

of course, you are probably also going to need CWSDPMI to actually run the apps, but, that might not fit on the floppy with everything else. I suppose you could put that in the folder with the dc client program.
 
I've tried all of that and I keep getting an error message: DOSCon32 Error (2008): Couldn't Obtain fixup table address 🙁

Another route I am thinking....what is the smallest in terms of MB Win32 OS there is? How far down can Win2k be stripped and have basic functionality? Win98SE?
 
Well...I've seen filelists for which files to delete to obtain 5 mb windows 95 installs, and one which claimed to reduce to as low as 4 mb.as usual, I can't seem to find it. I saw it mentioned on the tinyapps.org ezine, so, once again, I can't find it, and will edit if I do.
 
There are reports of this thing working under WINE right? Maybe my next project should be netbooting Linux with WINE installed... Or Knoppix with WINE/dpad...
 
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