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

Possible Answer

[autocracy]

Well, no matter how you look at it, you either have to install this emulation into the windows code (fat bloody chance), or you must emulate the disk below the windows level. Bochs looked interesting, but comments indicate it does everything in software and is hence slow. Plex86 seems promising though; it takes a VMWare approach to emulation by natively doing as much as possible and 'virtualising' the rest - pretty fast.

I'd opt for booting a minimalist Linux over the network that starts Plex86 with a network image as the hard drive. In this manner, I suspect you can do damned near whatever you want, including emulating CD drives.

Sites: www.plex86.org
bochs.sourceforge.net

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.