Gopher666 wrote on 2021-02-26, 20:08:

The thing is it's not that important for me if it's over 1.44mb because I will PXEload this anyway but for playing around purposes it's easier. Like In vmware you cannot attach in a larger floppy image, even if you do it will ignore the rest of the space over 1.44mb.

Bochs and Qemu apparently support 2.88MB floppies, although I note from my quick search that it sounds like Qemu determines what size the floppy drive is based on the initial image.

Gopher666 wrote on 2021-03-15, 16:31:

The point for me would be to have an out of the box solution which requires: […]
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The point for me would be to have an out of the box solution which requires:

1, No additional CD drives
2, No gotek or floppy
3, No secondary HDD

Yeah I already have that running what you mentioned just to PXE boot a regular DOS6.22 floppy which sees the disks then have another IDE HDD formatted to FAT16 with the installer sets ready on it.
Over the years I have made a fairly large (6GB) PXE collection with menus, various DOS floppies, Windows Rescue discs, Linux Live/Installers.

That sounds nice! Do you have any posts/documentation about this setup?

Although there was a lot of work with it I just absolutely love it that no need to look for installer sets and tools but everything is instantly available from the network and even for older machines which don't have boot roms I can just stick in a 3Com card and get it going.

I don't have any boot ROMs in my old NICs, so I want a flexible solution where I can PXE boot or use a floppy plus CD-ROM (or maybe other options).

I should probably do some reading up about flashrom and what devices I might need to purchase for my old NICs!

It occurred to me that EtherDFS might be a good solution in place of using the LAN Manager client, its aim is to not use much RAM, and I imagine it's smaller on disk too.

doshea wrote on 2021-03-24, 10:41:

I don't have any boot ROMs in my old NICs, so I want a flexible solution where I can PXE boot or use a floppy plus CD-ROM (or maybe other options).

I should probably do some reading up about flashrom and what devices I might need to purchase for my old NICs!

It occurred to me that EtherDFS might be a good solution in place of using the LAN Manager client, its aim is to not use much RAM, and I imagine it's smaller on disk too.

I've been playing with iPXE, and they offer a 1MB .iso which loads a 300KB ipxe kernel. Technically, you could make an isolinux/grub floppy to load it and then load 2.88MB floppy images through PXE (or larger HDD images).
I assume you are talking about pretty new systems (i.e.: after P4).

My oldest system I managed to PXE this year is a 486DLC (on 386 motherboard), but I had to look for older due to being compiled with i586/i686. Etherboot 5.44 (discontinued; fork of iPXE??) compiled under ubuntu 10.04 and oldest syslinux/pxelinux found on ubuntu sites.
I think latest versions of iPXE can still boot on a Pentium 1/MMX.

mathew7 wrote on 2021-09-13, 08:55:

I've been playing with iPXE, and they offer a 1MB .iso which loads a 300KB ipxe kernel. Technically, you could make an isolinux/ […]
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I've been playing with iPXE, and they offer a 1MB .iso which loads a 300KB ipxe kernel. Technically, you could make an isolinux/grub floppy to load it and then load 2.88MB floppy images through PXE (or larger HDD images).
I assume you are talking about pretty new systems (i.e.: after P4).

My oldest system I managed to PXE this year is a 486DLC (on 386 motherboard), but I had to look for older due to being compiled with i586/i686. Etherboot 5.44 (discontinued; fork of iPXE??) compiled under ubuntu 10.04 and oldest syslinux/pxelinux found on ubuntu sites.
I think latest versions of iPXE can still boot on a Pentium 1/MMX.

I've been using PXE booting for Pentium 1 through Pentium 4 plus some early Core series CPUs. Like you, for the older systems I figured out I needed to build Etherboot 5.4.4 - when I tested under Qemu, it seemed like Pentium II and later worked fine with iPXE, but under Qemu and real hardware, it just hung. I tried modifying Etherboot 5.0.10 to build under CentOS 7, and got it building, but it hung on boot too. I ended up building that under Fedora Core 1, and that worked but wasn't suitable for launching pxelinux for some reason I didn't record. Etherboot 5.4.4 built okay under FC1 and actually works with pxelinux to varying degrees on different machines. On older ones, UNDI and PXE chaining don't work for me.

https://ipxe.org/faq says "iPXE is developed by the people who originally developed gPXE (which evolved from Etherboot)."

https://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=10713 suggested that iPXE could be made to work on Pentium in this way:

To fix this edit src/config/local/general.h and add this […]
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To fix this edit src/config/local/general.h and add this

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1#undef TIVOLI_VMM_WORKAROUND

now you can build the latest version, and it will work on machines without MMX instructions, such as the 486.

but I tried that and it just made it hang at a later point - it still didn't work.

For anyone else reading this, this is what I got from building Etherboot - tiny 32KB disk images:

33176 etherboot-5.4.4-3c509.dsk
32824 etherboot-5.4.4-rtl8139.dsk

I wrote those to (1.44MB) floppies and boot from them when I want to PXE boot - I still don't have a way to program ROMs.

One day I might look into those issues with older machines some more, since I'd like to use iPXE for its ATA over Ethernet (AoE) support.