@Junkhacker Thanks for the suggestions. It will be a little while before I can be able to test all this stuff - this was mostly searching for leads to follow up later when I have a little more time. (like hopefully by this summer) Knowing that it can take months to ask the right sets of questions which take a few rounds to fully understand how something works and what to do with it.

When I finally get a chance to play with and learn things specifically set up for it, i’ll be posting everywhere including here, and in the subcommunities I think will be interested in whatever nerdly-cool setup i’ve come up with.

PS - FWIW I wasn’t necessarily planning iSCSI, just the ATA over Ethernet type hacks others have done in the past which as long as each OS supports it, i’m hoping should work without too much hacking. But I need to mess around with OS level files probably for things like Win98 to do what I want, so that also has to be learned about.

@Tom-Elliott No I understand that. Part of it is just curiosity how it all works. Part of it a desire to hack around and see what else it can be made to do, even if some of those ideas are a little halfbaked still. Sometimes i’m not sure if the best way to do something is by hacking an existing tool to do something unusual, vs trying to do it from scratch by using other tools entirely.

Mostly I just stumbled across this really cool program (which is FOG), that I never heard any of the people in my other little communities seem to know of, so I was trying to figure out what else I can do with this new tool and maybe show them an example. When I finally get a chance to install it and mess around some more it will probably be more clear what I should and shouldn’t do with it.

@Junkhacker

I will! It wont be instantly but eventually i’ll get around to playing with it on the old hardware knowing at least it isn’t inherently locked out. Now that I know FOG does it thru partclone.

If it uses http://partclone.org/ they specifically list support for like FAT16 and FAT32 - although it’s not clear if those are separate versions of the program, or if FOG incorporates an engine covering everything. (vs just the tested filesystems like NTFS for XP) Since i’m not a developer maybe someone who is can give me a heads up on whether in theory it should work then. You either used all the available partclone support or only stuck with NTFS, ext3 and the like.

If you didnt include every available bit of partclone software, perhaps a version could be made which does, and between that mod (if needed) and the ISO image I can explore just how old of hardware it’s possible to make FOG work on and report back my results since it’s a hobby to always tinker around with old hardware, and the imaging could let me do some cool things with it.

Furthermore if my experiments work well I can hopefully throw some pointers to other boards where i’m active and tell everyone how cool FOG is and that it supports their stuff, so maybe more people will use it, be able to contribute, or at least promote it more.

Just to followup, was there any plan of making an ISO available in some fashion, for the purpose of experimenting with older systems that may have difficulty loading PXE? Hadn’t heard anything in five days so hoping the way the forum disappears threads without comments hasn’t made this vanish…

@george1421 I suppose another expansion on the question would be that just like there are liveCD’s for even windows 98 and XP and Windows 10 now people have made, where it loads some things into RAM, and other parts of the filesystem are on the CD rom… I would like to know if there is some way to create a setup where FOG could load the RAM part of that minimum core, enough to see the network, and load the rest through normal network shares and such.

I mean if it can be set up for windows 98 and XP off read only media I assume there must be a way to make it work over the network whether read or write media. I’m mostly curious how to get that ‘core OS’ booted up in the first place, but my understanding is it’s very much like that… you create a sort of custom install, image the drive, and then this is loaded into RAM which at least gets you up to the desktop.

I don’t even mind possibly using existing liveCD’s as a mounted ISO for this process - provided PXE could mount an ISO and load the existing CD file system from it. Then I could if nothing else just learn how to make custom live CD’s and use that as a workaround (to get FOG to boot it) instead of trying to directly hack it.

@george1421 said in Is it possible to use FOG to network boot/diskless as well? (or what tools could):

Well… the answer is a bit complex.

Could you do what you want with fog, yes.

Your limiting factor is not FOG, or the hardware its the target OS you want to netboot. If the target OS supports netbooting then the FOG environment would help you get there.

You can netboot most linux operating systems, with the exception of DOS based Windows systems and WinPE systems you can’t netboot MS Windows operating systems because they aren’t designed that way. MS WIndows based operating systems have hardware drivers that expect to talk to real hardware and not a virtualized storage system.

Other issues I can see is that if you want to create a ram disk for this virtualized disk, your system will need to have enough ram to support the in memory disk as well as enough RAM to run the OS. The linux OS FOG uses loads its kernel and virtual hard drive in memory and runs out of memory, that is why FOS executes so fast. All of that is transferred from the FOG server to the target over pxe and http protocols.

It is possible I don’t understand very well what i’m asking either. I remember playing around with a long time ago software that would both create ramdisks and mount network drives as local even under DOS. I can’t remember what it was called. My guess was that if a software could make ram/network seem like a hard drive transparent to the system, even though Windows wasn’t designed for it, it should use it the same. (possibly with issues at reboot time admittedly, but first thing sfirst) I assumed Windows was all file based, except for the loader pointing to it where to start on the hard drive. Alternately if there were software to make it look like block level storage.

I know there were OS specific ways to do this at least for XP (ATAPI over ethernet or something) where a remote drive on the network was mounted as local. But that’s only for XP. Hence I was wondering if there was some way that could work for more than one system.

One specific desire for this setup is basically for a low budget LANparty server which i’d like to set up at various conventions (sci fi, anime, etc) where instead of any worry about installing and such, you just have people load one ‘gaming image’ which boots the OS and a selection of games were playing already configured up, in the correct versions and similar, with less hassle. Where any spare mobo and gpu can add another station without needing another hard disk and going thru a full install to add it - just point to the network and boot. I’m told that alot of internet cafes use something similar for their gaming setups but I dont know what it is and am sure it’s not free.

@george1421 said in Using FOG with older OS? (Win2000 or even 98/ME, earlier OSX/Linux):

I can say the issues you will run into more often than not is with the hardware.

FOG uses a customized version of linux called FOS. I suspect that FOS will run on even really old (ia32) based hardware. The issue is getting FOS to the target hardware. PXE booting was added to the PC 2001 spec USB booting wasn’t added until circa 2006 (I think). So with these old hardware systems you have to find a way to boot the FOS engine. With some creativity you could boot FOS from a CD drive.

We would have to ask the developers if they still include linux drivers for IDE drives and old nic cards (the 3com 3c503 and 3c509 cards were quite popular).

Really for your task at hand, I might use clonezilla with a portable usb hard drive over FOG for backing up these older systems. There is a lot less overhead and sometimes headache with clonezilla if all you are doing is backing up random systems from around your campus.

So there is not a specific lockout for either filesystems or an older Windows (even 98 or 2000) if it would say boot on NEWER hardware as well? (believe it or not there are still at least 2006 era boards which will boot Windows 98) If I can get FOG to boot, should it be able to image and restore whatever is on the drive?

I dont even know if the ISO for FOS needs to be available (though it’s an interesting alternative), there are PXE boot setups for even single floppies that will usually get an older network card up onto the network right back to the ISA card era. I’m just curious if besides network access, if there are any other OS lockouts or potentially problematic hardware that might have an issue.

Because i’m generally curious how it works in general, as well as also playing around alot with retrogames of the win98 era and similar, are there any fundamental reasons why FOG cant/wont work with yet older systems? Or is it something unsupported but possible? (or could it be made possible with very minor work) Such uses may be only marginally important, but if happened to be easy to implement might bring in “special case users” who might also become impassioned zealots spreading the word if an idea ‘catches fire’ in some smaller special interest community.

(Question also concerns the earliest versions of OSX and being curious what the oldest Linux version supported may be)

For instance I know of a few potential special interest purposes outside of my own. Besides me having some oddball software which doesn’t like XP but works on Windows 2000, let alone the Win98 only games, there are certain other legacy hardware users who sometimes run the same system for decades. (such as machine tools like CNC for instance) Some are networked, i’ve seen machine shops with a dozen old Windows for Workgroups era computers at times - generally fine if not touched but if it were me i’d rather have backup images of everything just in case. It’s just they are in FAT16 or FAT32 or older versions of NTFS.

I’m just curious what if anything is preventing these older systems from being backed up, assuming you could boot PXE and see the network? Does FOG work on a file based level, or can it do partitions and raw disk images as well, even new experimental linux filesystems (or old “obsolete” but maybe still on embedded networked system somewhere) just written back out each time?

Hello, i’m very interested in this project because i’m wanting to play around with drive imaging across multiple operating systems, and was looking for something free/open source and you fit the bill.

I am pretty sure I will end up trying to use this project one way or another, I am just trying to see whether it may also have use in a related task. I would like to set up storage virtualization so that all hard drives can be on one easily managed server. I need this to work MultiOS so ideally this would boot from PXE and load a boot image from a central server for the desired operating system - windows, mac, or linux for instance.

I am wondering if there may be some way to do this using FOG, even if it’s a bit clunky or a workaround or not really what it’s intended for. Such as having the PXEboot first load something which creates a RAMdisk or sets up a network drive to in some way work as a virtual local drive. So that a standard operating system could be loaded to install to C:/ and then having that state mirrored to the network server. The RAMdisk option would obviously be limited to on board ram, the network version could be larger but would be limited by bandwidth.

If FOG is not appropriate could someone suggest something which might be an option? I would really like to remain as multiOS friendly as possible and with PXEbooting because it can use even very old hardware. Something proprietary to only one system is not as much use to me.