tlug: Boot floppy for dd'ing disks

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

I have a series of open-access Win95/98 terminals here that seem
to make a habit of breaking down when they are not busy
collecting game software.  For a quick solution to this problem,
I would like to set up a standard, BOOTP-fed machine
configuration that I can plant on a machine's disk from a DAT
drive attached to a Sun elsewhere on the network, and
short-circuit the MicroSoft reinstall process (there's no
licensing problem; we have authority to install the relevant MS
utilities on all the machines in the Faculty; I just want to save
time and make my life simpler).  For this I figure I'll just need
a boot floppy imprinted with an IP address reserved for machines
undergoing recovery, and containing a kernel that can access most
Ethernet cards (or a set that I tune it for).  And "dd" in the
root filesystem somewhere.

Two questions:

  (a) Are there any fatal flaws in this plan?

and

  (b) If the answer to (a) is no or dunno ... I haven't used
      a boot floppy in donkey's years.  Where is a good place
      to look?  Anyone have favorites?

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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