OS-Independent Remote Network Boot?

driveLess asks: "Local hard disks are a pain, and I'd like to get rid of them. The problem? We have lots of computers running different OSes. Trying to support remote booting for every possible operating system would be a nightmare. The ideal solution would be a piece of hardware (PCI card, etc.) that emulated a drive at the block/sector level and fetched data over ethernet. The PC would think the drive was local, but it would actually be hosted on a server. Although this might sound easy, I haven't been able to find any practical way to do this. (iSCSI looks vaguely possible and might work someday, but it seems premature.) Has anyone else solved (or thought about) this problem?"

Comments

not for windows...

[dJCL]

I've seen some solutions for this. Anything but windows is easy to do. When I was at UofWaterloo I think they had hard drives in the windows systems that just rewrote themselves each boot, so that does not work for you. I know that you can remote boot DOS, novell did that I think. I have some boot rom's here that will load a floppy image and boot it, so put dos there.

Someone mentioned, boot dos and then load windows, could work for the 9X/ME line of windows.

I was reading Kuro5hin the other day and someone was describing his inside view of some microsoft work, and he did mention remote boot of win2k. But that might have been just remote install...

My best suggestion: get the code for the etherboot project(or whatever it is called, it open source...) and modify it with some hard drive emulation code. Those things load into memory just like a dos .sys file - ie they act like bios, just override the bios HD routines and run them throu the card... I don't know enough to do it, but would use the results if they exsisted.

Good Luck.

Missing the boat.

[Webmoth]

A number of posts here re: PXE-type boot, terminal server, etc. That's not what the poster wants.

Think virtual hard drive and controller. Something that FOOLS the OS into thinking there's an actual, physical, grinding, chattering, clunking, blinking, belching, farting hard drive in the computer. Complete with cylinders, heads, sectors, earwax, and belly-button lint. Something that shows up as /dev/sda in *NIX environments. Something that has its own network support so the system can appear as a stand-alone computer if you want it to.

I know of no PXE boot ROM, no terminal service, nothing of that sort that does this. If there is, we want to know!

What's the use for it? Well, I don't really know, and if I had one it would probably be in that big cardboard box in my garage but i'm sure it would be cool, and that's reason enough for me.