Hello Everyone,
I have a laptop with no CD-rom. What I want to do is load an operating system from a client on a network with a CD-rom. I assume I have to initialise the hardware on the laptop first, then access the CD-rom via the network. Firstly, how do I make a boot floppy for the laptop that initialises the PCMCIA ethernet card, then, how do I connect to the CD-rom accross the network?

TIA

prac2

you need the pcmcia.img image on the floppy, you can use rawrite to make the floppy in windows or dd in linux


then you need a server.

windows can be an http server using pws. that's the easiest way with windows. or if you have windows 2000 pro, nt server , xp pro you could also use the ftp server


or if you have linux you can use it as a server for http, ftp, or nfs

setup the laptop ip static if you do not have a dhcp server on the network

be sure to set the laptop's ip to be on the same network as your server.


setup the server to share the cdrom on http://serverip/name

then start network install
for server name just use the servers ip
access the cdrom by the name

thanks for that. I did a rawrite on pcmcia.img and bootnet.img, but after the kernel has loaded, the laptop says:

running install....
running /sbin/loader
install exited abnormally - recieved signal 11

I tried the disks on another machine, and it went through OK!

Any ideas what might be causing this?

TIA

prac2

Ok, I tried an older version of pcmcia.img and it worked ok with my old laptop. Thanks for your help David.

prac2

Glad you got it

Post the versions and the laptop if you have time.

Sounds like some useful info.

I have a
100CS Toshiba laptop
Xircom CreditCard ethernet adapter
40MB ram
RH 7.2 pcmcia.img bootable floppy
RH 7.2 pcmciadd.img bootable floppy

now the problem is that when I load the pcmcia.img floppy, it boots OK, but then it asks for a driver for the pcmcia card, which I asume is on the other CD, but when I go to load it, I recieve no confirmation or warning, and it asks for the bootable images, but only has a hard-disk option. I didn't even get to give it an IP or mask!

What am I doing wrong? Where do I get the drivers to initialise the PCMCIA card and connect to the NFS daemon on the server?

Please help

TIA

prac2

I believe that card is unsupported

If it is properly detected then after booting with the pcmcia.img you will get a menu to select NFS, FTP, HTTP, CDROM, or Hard disk

search for your card to see if anything new on it has come out

Alt-F3 should give you more info