[olug] OT: annoying bios!

[drag sidious]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 10:00:01AM -0500, Will Langford wrote:
> There's no solution to this, just a random ranting.  Might prove to be an
> interesting read.
> 

If you don't mind having a bit of flash or whatnot to support syslinux
bootloader then there is probably a work around you can do to do a
PXE-like booting situation.

http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php

You can use syslinux to bootstrap other booting methods. (I like to use
memdisk to load dos floppy images into ram to burn new bioses without
rebooting, for example.) I did this as a work around for a bunch of
systems I wanted to do network booting to support automated disk
imaging. The BIOS supported USB-ZIP booting, so I created a USB drive
with the same geometry of zip drives and used syslinux to bootstrap the
network booting.

Maybe something similar can be done for your situation. I don't know if
the etherboot roms still need that PNP extension though.