Hi,
I've been trying to get a laptop booted across a network for a few days now without success. The machine in question is a Toshiba Portege 3490CT that does not have an OS installed on it at the moment. The problem with it is that it doesn't have a regular floppy drive or CD drive, I don't have a SCSI CD drive to put into it and it doesn't recognise the USB floppy drive so my only other option, as far as I can see, is to boot it across a network. I've got a Slackware 10.1 box running a TFTP and DHCPD server which I'm trying to use to get it started. The first problem I ran into was that with the default kernel the laptop would not boot from it and gave the error message: "PXE-E3A: TFTP Too many packages" which, per one thread I found, occurs when the kernel is larger than 600KB. I then tried numerous times to compile a smaller kernel that would come under this limit but they would not compile if I disabled too many options and the ones that did were all larger than 1MB so that didn't work. I then found a kernel in the lowmem.i directory of the Slackware installation disc that was less than 640KB so I decided to use that. Now I don't get that original error message but instead I get the following lines repeated ad infinitum on the laptop when I try to boot it:
Code:
8000
AX:0208
BX:0200
CX:0002
DX:0000
I have no idea what this means and how to debug it. The laptop gets as far as being assigned a IP address, and does try to load the kernel but all I get then is the above output. The following is my dhcpd.conf file which I'm pretty sure is correct:
Code:
# dhcpd.conf
#
# Configuration file for ISC dhcpd (see 'man dhcpd.conf')
#
allow booting;
allow bootp;
option routers 192.168.3.6;
option broadcast-address 192.168.3.255;
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
option domain-name "slacknet";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.1;
default-lease-time 21600;
max-lease-time 43200;
ddns-update-style ad-hoc;
subnet 192.168.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.3.101 192.168.3.150;
}
group {
next-server 192.168.3.6;
#This is the pxe bootloader file
filename "vmlinuz";
# One host block per client. This network only has one.
host stb1 {
hardware ethernet 00:00:39:ED:7A:20;
#fixed-address 192.168.3.150;
}
}
Any idea what the problem is? On the other hand if anybody has any alternative ideas how I can get a OS installed on the laptop with the resources listed above I would appreciate any suggestions.
