Booting DOS without a floppy

[geokes]

I have a Dell PE2950 located in a data center 2 hrs driving away. I access it with a KVM over IP so I can get into the BIOS etc.

It has an Intel Pro1000PT NIC with PXE disabled. I need to enable PXE on it, for which I have to run the IBAUTIL -FE command from DOS. Not from a DOS prompt in Windows but the server has to boot to DOS.

The server does not have a floppy drive or a virtual floppy. It does have the Dell utility partition and Windows 2003 R2 x64 installed. It also has a CDRW.

Is there a way to use the Dell utility partition to run the above command?

(According to them no: “the utility partition provides only limited MS-DOS functionality and cannot be used as a general-purpose MS-DOS partition”)

Can the utility partition be modified for full DOS functionality?

Is there any other way to create a full DOS partition under these circumstances?

The next option would be to ask the techs in the data center (a paid service) to insert a blank CDR and burn Hiran’s or similar boot image to it.

Any better ideas?

[nmX.Memnoch]

You should be able to enable PXE on the NIC in the BIOS. And truth be told, if you install Dell OpenManage Server Admnistrator Managed Node, you can change a lot of BIOS options from within Windows.

EDIT: I just verified on one of my PE6850's that ou can change the PXE setting(s) in OMSA. This server has Broadcom NICs though so the options may be a bit different. I just got a PE2950 that's still being setup. I'll fire it up in a bit and check there as well.

Edited October 12, 2007 by nmX.Memnoch

[geokes]

I’m talking about a PCIe Intel NIC added to the system, not the onboard one which is accessible from BIOS.

The reason is that I use the on-board NIC on the WAN segment and I’m teaming the two ports of the add-on NIC on the LAN. And the LAN segment is where the DHCP and PXE servers located.

[nmX.Memnoch]

I was almost positive that could be changed using Intel PROSet but I guess not.

I did, however, just run Utility Mode on my PE2950. It's not even a DOS environment. It's a custom application for running diagnostics. I'm pretty sure the underlying OS is Win98 so there's probably some way to preempt it loading. At any rate, you're going to need some way to get to IBAUtil.exe anyway (the Utility Partition isn't accessible in Windows).

Why not use the onboard NICs, which allow you to easily control the PXE setting(s), for the LAN segment and the addin card for the WAN segment? The Broadcom NetXtreme II's can be teamed just like the Intel NICs can be.

[tevoy]

If you end up going with a bootable CD you might consider ISOLinux. It is able to launch dos based sessions and you could customize several for whatever you are trying to do. It is possible to allow the Boot CD to default to your local hard drive so after a suitable timeout it would just boot normally.

What I have done in the past is use a machine with a floppy to get the boot disks the way I want them. Then using Winimage convert the floppies to diskette images adjusting the size of the floppy to 2.88 and injecting any required files if necessary. ISOLinux will manage the enviroment launching into your customized dos session.

Have a look at

http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks/

section titled

OEM CD-ROM disc builder assistant