Making Boot ROMs for you!

The following is DisklessWorkstations.Com's policy for making custom Boot ROMs for network cards other than those listed for sale on our WebSite. Please check our list of pre-made Boot ROM's. Send email to engineering@DisklessWorkstations.Com asking if the Brand and Model of your Network Card is supported by Etherboot. You ship the network card that you would like us to make a Boot ROM for to DisklessWorkstations.Com. Ship to Address: Boot ROM Engineering DisklessWorkstations.Com 122 Garland Way Waterford, Michigan 48327 Please include with your shipment the following: Your Network Card Your Name Your Address Your Phone Number Your Email Address Instructions that you would like to us make a Boot ROM. We will put forth a reasonable effort to make a chip specifically for your network card. We will test your card with the Boot ROM image, in our testing labs with various Diskless Workstations. Note: PCI network cards require a specific Boot ROM image. ISA cards sometimes accept a more generic image. If we are successful making the Boot ROM for your card, then you can buy from www.DisklessWorkstations.Com one or more Boot ROM chips for this board. The price of the Boot ROM is typically $15.00 US, unless the chip required is more expensive. In any case our most expensive Boot ROM today is $18.00. We have inventory of many differing chips that will work in various cards. If the chip required for your network card is not carried in our inventory and you are purchasing less than five chips you may be asked to pay for our shipping charges to obtain your chips. In any case these charges are probably less than $5.00 to $10.00. We do not anticipate the cost of the Boot ROM to be greater than $18.00 but that will clearly depend upon the specific chip required. We keep the card you sent us in our lab, for support and future testing. You pay NO engineering charges or special fees for our time to make the chip. You are under no obligation to purchase the Boot ROMs if we succeed. Your least cost in this transaction, is the cost of your network board and shipping. We keep the board whether or not we are successful at making the chip. Normally, our engineering department will know if we can make your chip typically in less than 7 days from receipt. We use Etherboot code in our Boot ROM's. The changes we apply to Etherboot is listed below. DisklessWorkstation's changes to Etherboot. We make a couple of changes to the Etherboot image, they are as follows: We add a banner to the Etherboot that refers to the fact that DisklessWorkstations.Com made the ROM. We add a menu that allows you to do one of the following 3 things: Boot from the network (which is the point of this ROM in the first place). or Bypass the network booting and continue to boot from the Floppy drive, Hard Disk drive, or CDROM, if those pieces of hardware are in your computer. or Single step the booting process from the network, that allows you to slow down booting. This is helpful if you are having trouble booting from the network. To activate the menu feature, you must press the Space Bar as soon as you see the Etherboot/DisklessWorkstations.Com greeting when the Boot ROM begins to take over the CPU. If you do not Press the Space Bar the Boot ROM will boot from the network unattended. Note: The source code for the above changes is available upon request.

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