Re: Netboot and 3Com 90x PCI packet driver (bizzare)

[Erez Doron <erez@savan.com>]

I had the same problem
setting the /I=xxx was enough, no need for /S=xxx
bootp sent just fine, but i got arp timeout
( and there was no arp request)
could it be that i was missing the /S=xxx switch was the problem

Regards
Erez.


Mike Hammer wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First off, i did get the Netboot and 3Com 90x PCI card to work
> by using 3Com's packet-driver, 3c90xpd.com which came with their
> two floppies.  I'm using 29C512 to burn in 32KB of bootprom code.
>
> One thing that i noticed is this.  If i run the 3c90xpd.com from
> DOS command prompt just to test the packet driver, i can just
> type in the name of the program (3c90xpd.com) and no other parameters,
> and the packet driver seems to find the PCI network card okay.  It
> displays all the network card settings as far as MAC address, IRQ,
> i/o address and the default packet driver s/w interrupt it's installed to.
>
> Hence, with above experiment going okay without any extra arguments,
> i decided to build the bootprom the same way, i.e. providing no
> arguments for packet driver when Netboot asks for one.
>
> Now, when i burn in the bootprom binary (32KB) to 29C512 and try
> to boot from the network card, it seems the packet complains that
> there's no arguments provided to the packet driver.  The screen displays
> the help message as:
>
> Usage: 3c90xpd [Switches] /I= /K= /S=
>
> where: /I=packet driver software interrupt number
>        /K=PCI bus number
>        /S=PCI slot number
>
> Apparently the packet driver needed these arguments (/I= /K= /S=) to
> find the network card on PCI bus.  That's very odd since when i ran
> the packet from DOS prompt, i didn't had to provide this arguments
> for the packet driver to find the card and install itself.
>
> Anyways, i had to rebuild the bootprom and this time give these 3
> arguments when Netboot asked for them.  Now the network card boots
> and i can remote boot the client.
>
> The question is, why did running packet driver from DOS prompt
> w/o providing these arguments worked, whereas including the packet to
> the Netboot doesn't work w/o these arguments?
>
> I guess providing these arguments isn't too bad except that the PCI
> slot number had to be provided (/S=) which pretty much fixes the PCI
> slot in the motherboard where the network card can be plugged in.
>
> If anyone has experience in using Netboot with 3Com 90x packet driver
> and had such similar experience, i would appreciate i very much for any
> feedback or comments.
>
> PS. Just today i started getting all this off the wall postings from
>     Netboot mailing-list.  About 100 or so postings came through
>     the Netboot mailing-list that had nothing to do with bootprom.
>     Any idea what's going on?  Each of this postings had "netboot" at
>     the "To:" field of e-mail.  Are we having problem with the mailing-
>     list server?
>
> Thank you very much,
>
> mh


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