User manual

Etherboot User Manual

When you boot with this ﬂoppy it will load the Etherboot image from ﬂoppy and execute it. If you chose

the correct image, it should be able to detect your card. To get the bootrom to acquire an IP address and

load the intended code, you need to set up DHCP, tftp and NFS services, which we will discuss in the

next section. We suggest you continue to use ﬂoppy booting until you have completed the setup of the

server and are satisﬁed that diskless booting works.

In addition, you can generate images with the sufﬁxes .zlilo, .zpxe, .com, and .zrom by saying:

make bin/3c509.zlilo

and so forth.

The ones ending in .zlilo look sufﬁciently like Linux kernel images to be accepted by LILO, GRUB and

SYSLINUX for installation. Unfortunately loadlin uses a slightly different method of booting for Linux

kernels from LILO and SYSLINUX and will not work with these images.

The fact that .zlilo images look like a Linux kernel to LILO and SYSLINUX allows some interesting

booting possibilities. For example, you could use LILO to select between DOS/Windows and Etherboot

images from a disk that contains no Linux partitions, only FAT based partitions. This HOWTO

(../lilo+etherboot/t1.html) shows you how this can be arranged.

The ones ending in .zpxe can be booted by a PXE booter. This is useful to chain to Etherboot from PXE.

Here (http://www.geocrawler.com/lists/3/SourceForge/5299/125/6129709/)are some notes on how to

combine PXE and Etherboot.

The ones ending in .com are DOS format executables, suitable for starting from DOS. It requires a real

DOS environment, not a virtual DOS environment such as that provided by the DOS prompt window

under Windows. Also it requires that there be no XMS drivers or other memory handlers loaded. It is not

guaranteed to work if the environment is not clean, and sometimes not even if it is. The best chance of

this format working is when DOS is booted with no device drivers whatsoever. If you can, use raw ﬂoppy

or an intermediate bootloader for booting instead.

The ones ending in .zrom are images suitable for writing onto ROMs. If you are making a .zrom image,

you must set the PCI vendor and device IDs correctly for PCI NICs. Look at the ﬁle NIC. Locate the line

that has the correct PCI IDs for your NIC. This will give you the name of the ROM image you should

use. The PCI IDs are usually displayed by the BIOS on booting up. They can also be read out from a

running Linux system using the Linux PCI Utilities (http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/pciutils.shtml). If

you do not use the ROM with the correct IDs, the ﬂoppy version will work, but the ROM will not since

the BIOS will check for a match.

There are also .fd0, .dsk, .lilo, .pxe and .rom counterparts to the .z* versions of the images. The

difference is the .z* versions are compressed. Unless you doubt the (de)compression process, there is

usually no reason to use the uncompressed versions..

4. Setting up a diskless boot

In this section I assume you want to boot a Linux kernel. Booting a FreeBSD kernel is documented

elsewhere and does not require a generating a boot image. Booting a DOS kernel is similar, the main

differences being in the way you set up the boot image.