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

In these New Year's Eve moments, the holiday will come to the street of owners of “diskless” computers and laptops. Thanks to the efforts of the developers Herve Poussineau, Timo Kreuzer and Pierre Schweitzer, a fully functional ramdisk.sys driver has been added to ReactOS and PXE-boot support has been activated ( currently only for livecd). These innovations greatly 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 is posted on the project site that describes all possible ways to configure the client and the PXE server.

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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 the ReactOS LiveCD, if necessary, the latter along with the freeldr file can be replaced with a newer one from here .











In 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's readers a Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

To be continued in 2015! Stay tuned!