Little New Year's surprise. Meet RAM-disk and PXE network boot

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    In these pre-New Year minutes, the holiday will come to the street of owners of "diskless" computers and laptops. Through the efforts of the developers Herve Poussineau, Timo Kreuzer and Pierre Schweitzer in ReactOS, a fully functional ramdisk.sys driver was added and support for PXE-download via the network was activated (so far only for livecd). These innovations significantly expand the list of equipment supported by ReactOS, now it includes netbooks without an optical drive and diskless terminals.

    The target computer must be able to boot using the PXE protocol and have at least 192 megabytes of RAM on board. A special article has been posted on the project’s website that describes all the possible ways to configure the PXE client and server.

    In the case of a server on Windows, it is best to use the TFTPD32 program and the " image " of the PXE file system. The image already contains ReactOS LiveCD, if necessary, the latter together with the freeldr file can be replaced with a newer one from here .

    Instructions for setting up TFTPD32 in pictures
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    The contents of the folder for network download.

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    Configure IP Address

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    General TFTPD32

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    Settings Configure TFTP

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    Role Configure DHCP Role





    On the video:
    1) Download ReactOS LiveCD on real hardware via PXE-boot,
    2) using a third-party proprietary network adapter driver,
    3) and launching an RDP session with a computer on Windows 7

    The ReactOS team wishes all Habr readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
    To be continued in 2015! Stay tuned!

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