HP 4100DX

["Krzysztof A. Wychowalek" <kaw@zrodla.most.org.pl>]

As I am new to this list, I would like to welcome everybody.

Please excuse me a newbie question, but I have some problems 
and maybe on of you can help me.

I have an old Hewlett-Packard 4100Dx workstation, which is really 
nice small computer, 486DX4/100 with 12 MB RAM. It is 
_workstation_ computer, so it has no harddisk and hardly a 
possibility to connect any (let's say - no possibility). It also has no 
floppy drive. Just a built-in network card with many different booting 
options. One of them is BOOTP.
My plan was to convert this HP into nice Windows 95 machine 
running booting diskless from BOOTP server. I have linux machine 
(Debian potato) so I installed BOOTP server on it, also TFTP 
server. I configured BOOTP so it should recognize the HP. It does! 
When I boot HP now, it get its IP address from server and then 
download a file through TFTP. Unfortunatelly, when the file is 
donloaded, it hangs saying " received ... Kbytes, sorted .... 
Kbytes, invoked primary bootstrap".

The image file it is downloading I prepared with MKNBI-DOS utility 
from the NetBoot package. I copied some files (io.sys, msdos.sys, 
command.com) from Windows system floppy to a directory and 
made a file of them with mknbi-dos (I couldn't do it directly from 
/dev/fd0 as mknbi was saying it was not DOS floppy, although it 
was). But I think that something is not good with this image, as HP 
hangs after downloading it?

Next (the main) question is - even if HP somehow unpacks the 
imagefile into ramdisk and boots in DOS mode, how can I make 
Windows 9x running? Of course all the file should be on linux 
server, but how HP will connect to it? Some network software is 
necessary, but it should be small enough to fir into RAMdisk. I 
thought about SMB client, but I think it is somewhere "deeper" in 
Windows, so Windows should be somehow running before trying to 
use it. Does anybody have any idea how to deal with it?

If anyone has any kind of expierence with booting diskless PC. I 
would be very grateful for any suggestions. Thanks in advance.

BTW - what is really a differce between "Netboot" and "Etherboot" 
software and which one shall I better use for my purpose?

Krzysztof Wychowalek
ICQ# 34184303
GSM +31626302216
PGP Key ID 0xEA9D2A3C
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