What does the Boot ROM in an NIC do?

[TheCorm]

I have some Biostar motherboards with onboard LAN that have Boot ROM's.

I was just wondering exactly what they do? 4 of these systems are required to not have CD-ROM or floppy drives so I was wondering if it was possible at all to boot from a CD-ROM on a networked machine using this feature on the card?

If so....how do I go about this?

Cheers,

Corm

 

[Nothinman]

My UltraSparc has the ability to boot from the network in the firmware, I'm not sure if it's the same for PC NICs and I don't have one to try it out with :/

But basically what it did is get an IP from a DHCP (or bootp) server, in that DHCPACK it specifies an image file and boot server to boot from, it downloads the image via tftp and boots from it. This worked really well for me to boot Linux over the network and install it locally (no cdrom or floppy in the box) but I'm not sure how applicable it is to Windows.

 

[TheCorm]

thanks...bump for any further ideas

 

[n0cmonkey]

It can work with x86 hardware. Setup Linux, its pretty simple.

 

[TheCorm]

Can it work with Windows 2000 installing though?

 

[Jayllo]

I don't recall Win2k having a tftp server, but their DHCP has BOOTP options for a rom file. A network install would require a PXE complaint NIC and a RIS server. I actually never did it using PXE, but some proprietary 3com software thats bundled with the RIS server. Of course it only supports 3coms and few BIG name manufacturers.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Jayllo
I don't recall Win2k having a tftp server, but their DHCP has BOOTP options for a rom file. A network install would require a PXE complaint NIC and a RIS server. I actually never did it using PXE, but some proprietary 3com software thats bundled with the RIS server. Of course it only supports 3coms and few BIG name manufacturers.

There are Windows based tftp servers.

 

[Jayllo]

There are NFS support for Unix through Windows but the MS implementation costs A LOT. I was just talking about of the box.