Not detecting Ethernet card

[arnab]

I have eserver xseries 330. This system does not have HDD and cannot boot from CDROM or USB.(Actually HDD crashed). I could successfully boot the system from PXE and then entire OS loads up. However, I see that it has several errors while trying to load driver for Ethernet. Is there any way I can load driver for ethernet for this system?

[robc]

I believe you need the e100 firmware for your network card, it is in the firmware-2.6.29.1-tinycore extension. This would require a remaster for it to be available on boot since there is no hard drive...or you can setup a tce directory for your extensions on a USB drive.

[arnab]

Thanks Robc for the reply.

I am not an expert in linux and have been looking desperately for this information. I did figure out that I needed the firmware and downloaded it and modified the isolinux.cfg file to load that firmware. It took long hours for me to get there. Following are the contents of isolinux.cfg file. But this did not work out. I am pretty sure that I am not able to load the firmware properly.

display boot.msg
default tinycore text
label tinycore
   kernel /boot/bzImage
   append initrd=/boot/tinycore.gz image=/firmware-2.6.29.1-tinycore.tcz quiet max_loop=256

implicit 0   
prompt 1   
timeout 300
F1 boot.msg
F2 f2
F3 f3


I do not know if that is correct or not, but this did not work out for me. I am not sure how I can put that firmware in USB and how I can let it know that it has to load the driver from USB instead of PXE location.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks Arnab

[robc]

IMHO it would be a good idea to use a USB drive for backup and tce storage. This way you can save your network settings and any extensions that you may use. Use these steps (since you do not have a network connection):

1. Create the directory ./tce/optional in the root of the usb drive. (ie mkdir -p /mnt/sda1/tce/optional)
2. Download and copy the firmware-2.6.29.1-tinycore.tcz extension and md5.txt to the ./tce/optional directory on the usb drive.
3. Edit the boot line and add the bootcodes: tce=sda1 backup=sda1 waitusb=5
4. Boot the computer with the usb drive plugged into a working usb port.
5. Use the appbrowser to manually load the firmware extension, connect your network card, then use appbrowser to download any other desired extensions.
6. Use the Apps_Audit tool in the Control Panel to add the firmware and other extensions to the onboot list.

Notes: this assumes the computer will add the usb drive as sda1, it may be added as a different device depending on the board.

[gerald_clark]

If it will pxeboot, the firmware can be built into a second ramdisk image that can be loaded along with the standard initrd.
See the netboot section in the wiki.