[WBEL-users] Re: drvnet.img

[Keith Morse]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004, Kirby Bohling wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 10, 2004 at 09:55:00PM -0700, Keith Morse wrote:
> > 
> > Hopefully someone has seen this issue before.  I need to use boot floppies 
> > to install whitebox on a pc that has no cd drive.  It's a funky dell 
> > desktop that requires a specific drive.  I'm using winimage to write the 
> > image to a floppy.  The bootdisk.img works without problem.  With 
> > drvnet.img winimage fails to read the image.  I've tried three of the 
> > mirrors so far, all with the same behaviour "error reading image".
> > 
> 
> 	Can you get the thing to net-boot?  If you can, you can do a
> network install with kickstart.  With kickstart, I believe you can
> sepecify a URL for the driver images if you need a really odd one.
> However, I believe the network install has all of the drivers you'll
> need on the kernel images (unlike the floppies due to limited
> space).

Chicken and egg thing.  No driver for the nic so I can't go to the network 
for the nic driver.



> 
> 	I've done the network install several times at home, it's a
> relatively straight forward process once you figure out how to
> configure the TFTP server, and realize that you have to use the
> netbooting parts of syslinux.  It took me about two hours from
> knowing nothing about a TFTP booting to getting the install working,
> by judicious use of google, and reading the RHEL and syslinux
> documentation.
> 
> 	I also don't believe you that the machine won't take a CD-ROM
> drive.  Install a SCSI one, or install a decent IDE card and you
> should be able to boot from one.  What kinda dell is it just so I
> know what to avoid in the future?


It's a Dell GX-50, a small form factor desktop.  I could have gotten a cd 
drive to work but lacked a molex power splitter to power the cd drive, 
there were no spare connectors from that power supply.  But that was late 
Saturday and now that it is Monday morning, things have improved 
considerably.