8 replies to this topic

[Chuck Barnes]

So I have a need to boot to ms dos to run ghost in order to ghostcast image a number of pcs.

I have a working ubuntu PXE server that can boot from a variety of sources.
Ubuntu live CD
Linux System Rescue CD
Bart Iso
Dell Diag iso
And a plain unmodified .img file of a dos 6.22 disk.
All boot correctly.

Now I also have a USB drive that boots to msdos and also has ghost and other things to enable TCP/IP. Which works just fine booting on its own.

but I dont want to have 100s of usb drives sitting around. I want to PXE boot the same contents of the working dos bootable usb drive with PXE.


i've tried to dd the sub drive to an iso but it does not boot. says: "non-system disk or disk error"

if i try to open the newly made iso with ubuntu archive manager it says its not in ISO 9660 format.

I need more space than the img file will let me have. I tried to edit the working dos622 img file to add to it what i need but it only hold 1.44mb of data.

So now i am stuck trying to get a working usb dos boot drive to pxe boot from ubuntu.

Any help?

[Chuck Barnes]

So i found this:

http://www.allbootdi....2_bootdisk.iso

i put that into my pxe server with this menu item
label Dos Boot
lernel memdisk
append iso raw initrd/=DOS6.22_bootdisk.iso

This kinda boots. it drops to a prompt talking about missing command.com

so that is pretty close. assuming it worked all i would have to do is edit the iso, add my files/customization's and it would work.

Why am i getting that error about command.com

[erwan.l]

dont know if this will help but here below my working pxe boot for a "windows 98" dos 1.44 floppy disk :

LABEL DosW98
MENU LABEL DosW98
kernel memdisk
append initrd=images/98.ima

may be stick to a floppy image format instead of an iso?

/erwan

[Chuck Barnes]

dont know if this will help but here below my working pxe boot for a "windows 98" dos 1.44 floppy disk :

LABEL DosW98
MENU LABEL DosW98
kernel memdisk
append initrd=images/98.ima

may be stick to a floppy image format instead of an iso?

/erwan

And im sure that works but the ima file is only 1.44mb in size. and you can not add any more than that to the ima file? but i have around 10mb of extra files to add to the bootup. ghost.exe network drivers etc.
So a bootable iso would solve that problem but I can seem to make an iso with the files and make it dos bootable.

[erwan.l]

maybe your iso is wrong and not the pxe boot itself.
try booting your iso in vmware, qemu or else first?

/erwan

[Chuck Barnes]

correct so i found that pre made dos iso from allbootdisks.com.(the link above) I tried that as is. and it boots from a normal cd. So i know that works. So now the plan was to edit THAT iso add the files and it would be solved. BUT before I did that I wanted to try it as is FROM pxe. and that is where i get the can find command.com error.(my send post in this thread).

So i know the iso is good. so i must have something misconfigured in pxe, right?

[Wonko the Sane]

As a general rule of the thumb, .iso's should NOT be edited.
On the contrary there is no problem whatsoever to make a bigger floppy image (or even a super-floppy one).
Then using it directly or making a .iso out of it are both feasible options.
Using DOS 6.22 may be part of the problem, though I don't think it is a real issue, it only adds a single important step (IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS must be first files in the filesystem and FAT table).

Here is a recent thread where this same issue has been talked about:
http://www.911cd.net...showtopic=24663


Wonko

[Chuck Barnes]

So I tried to follow that post. I ended up here

i d/led his blank 36 MiB image and i injected my files from the bootable usb into it using winimage. It boots from pxe now. not sure how he did it but i suppose this is all i need.
Its unrelated to the img issue but now I have other issues with it booting from pxe. It uses editvar to get user input from the dos prompt but now it hangs the pc. i can comment editvar out of the autoexec but its not what i want it to do. Not sure what is different in a pxe environ than a dos one.

thanks for the help everyone.

[Wonko the Sane]

Cannot say what it could be.

Can you try some alternate ways to provide input?
http://www.robvander...m/userinput.php

Ask or Wbat should do.


Wonko