I show off here with my RP Female voice, taken from dead ringers. I'm showing off the designs for our community center PXE boot server which will allow refirbished computers to be installed with all the required OEM and media packages ready for distribution to the community.
Video Rating: 5 / 5
I work at a computer service company called Northlake IT in Slidell, Louisiana (Across the lake from New Orleans) and you don't want to be around the guys I work with when a much needed disk goes missing. So shortly after building the FOG server to decrease the amount of time it takes us to prepare workstations for our clients (which for 10 systems might have taken us 2 days to set up on a one-at-a-time basis decreased to about 10 minutes using multicasting), I eventually saw the potential for completely diskless booting of all our commonly used software. The guys I work with like norton ghost, and they were using a floppy to boot it with no network capabilities. Often computers don't have floppy drives, our ghost disk would go terrible, we couldn't find the disk, we couldn't get the system to boot from an external floppy, or we had no more floppies to make a new disk. None of that is any longer a concern. We have greatly increased out productivity, and convenience. As of the creation of this video, over the network, we can boot unattended xp installations, xp vista and 7 recovery consoles, ghost 7.0 & 11.5 w/ network capabilities, acronis, dos, 2 builds of trinity rescue, ubuntu 8.04 & 9.10 livecds, and a winPE environment. If anyone needs a PXE bootable usb NIC for systems that are either too ancient or don't have a PXE bootable adapter check out argontechnology.com Hope you like the video, if anyone has any questions or would like a copy of an image I use, let me know!
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Some times it is very useful to boot from a Linux installation CD or DVD in order to use tools straight from the CD/DVD. You are not necessarily looking to install Linux but simply to make use of its low level software tools.
There are a number of ways to do this but I shall list just two as they are the most familiar to me.
1) Using the first CD or DVD from RedHat/Fedora/CentOS media :-
Set your BIOS to boot from your CD-ROM drive
When the boot process reaches the boot> prompt, enter "linux rescue" and hit return, this will provide you with a number of boot options, choose the most basic as we don't need any networking functionality.
This will load linux into memory and provide access to the programs held on the CD/DVD.
The following command will allow you to wipe the beginning of your hard drive thus removing key information about anything held on the drive.
See below
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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=50000
or
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=50000
depending on whether you have a SATA drive or an IDE drive respectively.
2) Boot from a Puppy Linux CD, start a terminal window then follow the same dd commands described above.
Upon begining an operating system installation it will appear that the hard drive is groundbreaking new and completely blank.
