What I'm looking for is a way to network boot some old PCs to my BartPE build. The specs on these computers vary but on average, the specs are around:
600MHz Intel
128MB RAM
PXE bootable
no CD drive
USB 1.1 (Since 1.1, takes 15 – 20 minutes to boot from USB CD-ROM, I do not like booting this way)
Problem is, my PE build is 159MBs --- 31MB over the size of the RAM.
The current way I've got my PXE config is to download a ramdisk hard drive image to the client PC. I’m using TFTPD32 (with pxelinux menu), a cross over cable, and a harddisk image loaded into ram (RAMPE-R2.img) to boot a PC.
Heres my
WINNT.SIF:
[codebox][SetupData] BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)" BootPath = "\i386\System32\" OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportashd /rdpath=RAMPE-R2.IMG" [/codebox] Here is the contents of my c:\ramboot2 folder (the folder that TFTPD32 points to) C:\ramboot2\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\ramboot2\i386\SETUPLDR.BIN C:\ramboot2\NTLDR C:\ramboot2\NTDETECT.COM c:\ramboot2\pxelinux.cfg\default c:\ramboot2\pxelinux.0 c:\ramboot2\startrom.0 c:\ramboot2\RAMPE-R2.IMG (Hard drive image of my current PE) c:\ramboot2\menu.c32 c:\ramboot2\winnt.sif
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The first idea I came up with (for ease of PXE configuration) would be to take out anything unneeded out of my PE build / hard drive image. The main things that I need to have are in my PE build are networking ability, DriveImage XML, and RealVNC --- anything else can go.
I have attached Directory-File-Listing.txt (Which is a list of files in my current RAMPE-R2.IMG)
Let me know what other information you need / any questions you have.
I'm also open to other ideas about booting a PC over a network with such little RAM if the shrinking option is too hard / not possible.
Please Advise!
Thanks!
-Latigo