Thursday, September 03, 2009

Netboot.me DOES work on EeePC 901........

...........although, as of this writing, it's still a bit shaky.
Here's what I did but I must first acknowledge the huge help I received from this thread.
1. Download netboot.usb from here and use this command to burn the image to a usb key (I used a 1 gb key but as the image is less than 300 kB in size, a very much smaller key would suffice):
# dd if=netbootme.usb of=/dev/sdX
2 Insert the usb-key, reboot the 901 and press F2 as it's booting, or more particularly, when the Asus EeePC page appears. This will bring you to the BIOS pages.
3. Scroll across to the Boot tag and, in the Boot Device Priority list enable OnBoard LAN Boot ROM and then press F10 to save and reboot.
4. Press F2 when the machine is booting again to go back to the BIOS pages.
5. As the machine starts to boot, you should see a reference to the Atheros Boot Agent appear asking for Shift-F10 to be pressed to configure this device. Press Shift-F10 to be brought to a blue configuration page.
6. I set the four available config options to:

Net Boot Protocol PXE
Boot Order Int 18h
Show Config message Enable
Show Message time 5 seconds

7. F4 to save and quit
8. This will bring you again to the BIOS page where you scroll over to the Boot tab
9. Click on Boot Device Priority list and move Network: Atheros Boot Agent to the top.
10. Click on Hard Disk Drives and move the usb key option to the top
11. Hit F10 to save and quit
12. Now you should be miraculously brought to the Netboot.me Graphical menu
13. My experience to date has been that, on this machine at least, not all of the options in the menu work. So, in the Live OS section, both Tiny Core and Micro Core seemed to work fine but MirOS didn't. Aditionally, on one occasion, the download of tinycore.gz bailed out repeatedly after about 7500kB (of 8800kB) download. Further, both GParted and Parted Magic didn't work for me but MemTest86, HDT and Smart Boot Manager did.

This is a work in progress so it'll be very exciting to keep in touch with this project.

2 comments:

  1. Just a note - with the solution we finally settled on, you don't need to install dnsmasq or set up tftp.

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  2. OK, thanks, I misunderstood this. I've made the changes to the howto above.

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