Booting one PC using a partition on another PC's hard drive.

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

I'm about to receive an old P2 233 w/ 64 megs of ram but no hard drive. Is it possible for me to put a network card in and use a partition (say 4-5 gigs) from my other computer as the boot divice for my new/old comp. I want to put Linux on it if that makes any difference.

If this is possible, would I be able to access the partition from the good comp? I'm assuming yes. Right now I've got XP and Mandrake as a dual boot on my main PC. I'd want to be able to access the Linux installation and just boot strait from it. I'd also want to be able to have both up and running at the same time (one in XP and the other in Linux).

What distro would you reccomend? Gentoo is out of the question b/c I'm on dial-up. Would Mandrake 8.2 run on a P2 233? I assume I won't run into any problems with older hardware and Linux.

[jglen490]

In reality, the network card would have to be detected in the BIOS as the boot device on your P233. I don't know that to be possible or impossible, but that's the route that the BIOS would have to go to find the Linux partition on your other machine.

Alternatively, you could find a floppy-based distro that has support for network cards, boot your P233 from the floppy, then network to your Linux space on your main machine. If I read you right, you already have Mandrake on your main PC, so you can test the floppy distro thing without a new Linux install.

Yes, Mandrake will work fine on a P233.

So, unless you really want to learn about floppy-based distros and networking (does a headless, floppy based, Linux router sound intriguing?), perhaps the next best thing to do would be to find small hard drive (2 - 10GB), and just install directly to your P233 system.

You have lot's of possibilities !!

[Evil-Lab-Monkey]

Thanks for the help. Yes you read me right, I do have Mandrake installed already. There's a possibility that I'll get a 4 gig hard drive in the near futur but I'd kinda like to do this anyways... just to see if it's possible.