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Chips 386
Posts: 34
| Okay, I'm not sure that this could be in any catergory of this forum, but it's highly tied to retro hardware, so yeah
I was wonderning if any of you ever tried to make your retro computers able to boot on the network.
I've made a PXE server with my raspberry pi, but this only works with "late retro hardware" (basically anything with PCI, anything prior that won't be able to boot from PXE). It works great, but I'd like to have something more "universal" such as RPL. However there is very little informations of how to do that. I'm pretty sure that the server software I installed on my raspberry pi works because when I entered the MAC address of my 486 (wich has a 3com etherlink III and a boot rom on it (and if you want it, I can upload a dump of the ROM and an image of the floppy used to configure it)) in the config file, the computer did something. However the best I could get was the computer asking me in my tongue (I'm not a native english speaker and the floppy image that I tried to boot from was localized) to insert a valid disk. But otherwise what it does is just a blinking cursor ... Once it even started to make continuous beeps X)
But yeah, I've no clue on how to configure that thing ...
my config file was containing :
HOST {
ethernet = 00:20:af:c8:5e:d7;
FILE {
path="/rplboot/images/DOS7.img";
//offset=0x52EB;
length=0x5A0;
load=0x1000;
};
execute=0x1000;
//pacing=2000;
};
(I placed these by guessing, I've actually no idea of what I've done).
It's a shame because I saw in the manual of my boot rom (yes, that thing came in a box with manuals and stuff) that it could allow people to boot on windows. I wonder how far we could get with that kind of thing if this was working. Maybe an even more reliable solution to failing hard disk drives and floppies ^^. Except that we would be limited to 10Mbps :/. But that would still be really neat I think (being able to install a retro OS without having to use any physical device is awesome imo)
Edited by Deksor 2016-12-20 10:31 PM
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
 
Location: Hull, UK | I tried this once using some software called CCBoot. I could actually boot DOS and do a few things, but it was a bitch to set up, especially if I wanted the ability to write data back over the network. Performance was absolutely horrible too and I could not enable things like EMM386 as they would cause the Ethernet card to drop for a second, preventing further loading.
It was OK for a simple DOS boot though and I considered using it to do installs, but for some reason this was unsuccessful - I don't remember what exactly went wrong now, but something did. Otherwise, everything back to my 386 seemed to be able to boot from the network using a gPXE ROM, you just couldn't really do a lot afterwards.
Unfortunately I have no experience at all with Raspberry and can only guess at how that configuration file will affect anything.
One thing I definitely do remember being an inconvenience, and it may be what is happening here; no matter what any of the software I tried would claim, any "Dynamically Expanding" images would not work, I had to use "Fixed Size" images. That's the way it went for me anyway, fixed-size VHD files were all that would work correctly and it took up more room than I liked. | |
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Harris 286
Posts: 15
Location: Sunny Blackpool | Greetings both. I did some digging around and found this old documentation from DLink describing how to make RPL booting work using a Windows NT server and installing Windows 95 using this. It may be of interest to yourself.
http://ftp.dlink.ru/pub/Bootrom/Description/Remote%20Booting%20for%...
I would also recommend running Wireshark on the Pi as that should show you where it is getting hung up. | |
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TM Crusoe
Posts: 618
Location: Hull, UK | I suppose one could always run an NT Server VM to save on hardware, would be easier to manage. A good idea, I just always found the process a little awkward. | |
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Network booting