Installing etherboot in Intel Pro/100 cards

The idea behind etherboot is to put the DHCP and TFTP clients right into the chip on the network card, eliminating the need to use PXEboot. Instead it jumps right into loading Linux and the initial ramdisk (via tftp). Etherboot can still do PXEboot.

An interesting page decribing etherboot is on the LTSP wiki, here.

Get the PROBOOT.exe tool from Intel. Read the instructions linked from that page, too. Run PROBOOT.exe somewhere convenient to unpack its contents.

Use "lspci -n" to figure out exactly which card you have.

Use the ROM-o-Matic to create a new Etherboot based ROM image. Download the image and save it somewhere. Rename it as detailed in the instructions at Rom-o-matic so that it can be used with ibautil.exe.

See also wband.com

Then you load the ibautil.exe and new ROM image into an MSDOS boot floppy.

Boot the machine with the Intel card from the floppy.

Use ibautil.exe (which is part of the ProBoot.exe kit) or fboot.exe which is available from wband.com to flash the new image into the card. Ibautil.exe is also used to turn on and off the Wake-on-lan function. Turning off WOL will save power when your machine is off.

Reboot the PC, enter BIOS setup mode, and configure it to boot from the network card. Save changes and exit BIOS. The system should now boot from the card.