If anyone doesn't have a PXE image for their network card and is interested in trying network booting/imaging, the ipxe project (https://www.ipxe.org) has support for a load of PCI (and ISA!) cards which you can use to build a version of ipxe which you can flash to a ROM image:

https://ipxe.org/appnote/hardware_drivers

Usually add-in network cards didn't come with a PXE image, as it cost extra. Modern integrated motherboards of course have it as standard.

(Subtly wonders if he should do a 'diskless win9x machine' writeup or not. Decides to do so.)

It's possible to use a network deployed dos floppy image and a minimal networking stack (like mtcp) to fully netboot a win9x instance.

The boot process more or less goes:

RPL / PXE pulls a 1.44mb floppy image from the fileserver, which is a boot disk for that version of win9x.

The system boots this image. The image contains himem.sys, emm386.exe, xmsdsk, smartdrv.bin, scandisk, attrib, any dos drivers you need, then finally a packet driver for the nic and mtcp. It has a 'full install' version of msdos.sys.

(If you use pxe, then you can use the universal pxe packet driver, which is quite small.)

XMSDSK gets set up to host the OS, and to load at the top of ram with the /t switch. Must be loaded from autoexec.bat to stop windows complaining.

C needs to be ~512mb to 1gb in size.

MTCP is used to pull a smartdrv3 compressed volume file which gets written to the ramdisk. Attrib is used to set the file system and hidden.

Scandisk is called on the volume file with the undocumented /mount syntax.

[Scandisk C: /mount]

after that, you'll have a mounted compressed C drive with a full windows deploy inside, and you just need to start it by calling win.

davidrg wrote on Yesterday, 05:48:

Could be PXE, and if so is probably usable to boot something. I think by the time PXE came around, PCs were mostly just being network booted to install an operating system - not to run one. So options are probably a bit more limited than with RPL.

the PC 2001 system design guide (chapter 3) actually makes PXE 2.1 mandatory for machines that are supposed to run windows 2000.

megatron-uk wrote on Yesterday, 09:26:

If anyone doesn't have a PXE image for their network card and is interested in trying network booting/imaging, the ipxe project (https://www.ipxe.org) has support for a load of PCI (and ISA!) cards which you can use to build a version of ipxe which you can flash to a ROM image:

https://ipxe.org/appnote/hardware_drivers

Usually add-in network cards didn't come with a PXE image, as it cost extra. Modern integrated motherboards of course have it as standard.

very interesting, although a shame i don't see the common intel 82557 (pro/100b)/82558 (pro/100+) in there. some 82558 cards even look to have soldered EEPROMs instead of a socket, so if those are hotflashable via some software, you wouldn't even need a programmer. i suppose one could hotflash a socketed EEPROM as well, though am not sure if the software would be able to work with every type of EEPROM that one could put in that socket.

of what's listed there i have a 3c509b, so hopefully the 509 listing extends to that. how to know what type of EEPROM will be compatible with the resulting ROM file? guess i could try one of the options mentioned here: XT-IDE BIOS with 3com 3c509B

i'll note that it's not really my preferred card due to the need to set 10mbit HD on the other side - never got 10mbit FD to work for some reason. so with that being said i should clarify that i was really only talking about a OS install via network to a local HDD - assuming C: in the method from the previous post is a network drive i doubt win9x performance will be all that, especially on said 1ombit HD link.