> objective: old pcs with small hard-disks (500mb, 4gb to 8gb) are to be > used for merely booting into ltsp. instructions are *not* to boot from > NIC-based ROM, or from floppy, or from LILO or GRUB. just the hard disk. > > one pc, with a 4gb hard disk, does successfully boot into LTSP without > using lilo. > [...] > > problem is, what is that *magic*? > > fyi, the Rom-o-matic created image that works is: > /yadda/eb-5.2.0-rtl8139.zdsk > and am using ltsp3.0 > > so far, i have tried the following, without success: > > > 1) connected the 8GB hardisk to hdb, but left it unmounted. > #cat /yadda/eb-5.2.0-rtl8139.zdsk >/dev/hdb > no success. the workstation finds no ROM to get booted. > > 2) shove the working floppy into its drive. > # cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/hdb > same error. > > 3) using fdisk, deleted all partitions, leaving it unformatted. > #cat /yadda/eb-5.2.0-rtl8139.zdsk >/dev/hdb > same error.
At that step I really wonder where that partitions come from - the partition table must have been dead after step 1 already. If you have devfs (perhaps with *some* symlinks to trick you into thinking that you don't have it) you just created a file /dev/hdb all the time :-( If you have some directory like /dev/discs/disc0, then you probably have devfs and need to cat into /dev/discs/disc1/disc (and before that check it's the right drive! It's not so clear if there are scsi devices, numbering might be a bit odd!) > 4) again deleted all partitions, then with the floppy: > # cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/hdb > same error. > > 5) deleted all partitions, created a new primary partition, hdb1. made > it active. formatted it to ext3, mounted it to test, then unmounted, > then: > # cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/hdb1 > same error. I'd use "dd" btw., like this dd if=/yaddayadda/etherboot.zdsk of=/dev/hdb bs=1024 which gives you one more chance that it's just cat that doesn't like device inodes (instead of regular files). Just a wild guess. HTH Anselm ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
