Grub is able to boot on a partition and set a new default one at next reboot. I use it to make a systematic reboot after a cold reboot, because my motherboard dont detect my second sata at first boot. Or using the old way, just switch your default partition using parted or gpart or anything elese. I used this to make a copy of a win2000 partition to a tape drive or another partition from a linux partition. The initiation was done from the window that was changing the default boot partition before to init a reboot, and linux was reseting the original boot before to backup the partition and reboot. Hope this will give you some idea. On Jan 24, 2008 4:36 PM, Rob Lines <rlinesseagate at gmail.com> wrote: > While this is not a problem with CentOS I am hoping to solve the situation > using a CentOS machine. For anyone not interested I am sorry to clutter > your mail box. For everyone else any ideas or suggestions are welcome. > > A bit of background: > > We have an application that runs only in DOS 6.22 at the moment that we > would like to run on all of our desktop computers each time they boot up. > Our workstations are mostly Windows XP with some Linux. > > Our goals: > > We would like to be able to have the machines boot into DOS and run the > application and then reboot to the normal hard drive. We would like to have > it require no user intervention or as little as possible. We would also > like to have it only run the app during the first boot up of the day. > > Thoughts at the moment: > > One idea we have at the moment is to create a PXE server with the DOS boot > image on it. (I have done that before using Windows RIS but we are trying > to avoid a windows Server as RIS is a bit of a pain and it prefers user > interaction. It also would not fit well with our solution to have it only > run once a day.) We could then run the application and inside the DOS image > we could have it reboot the machine. We could then set the client machines > to boot PXE as their first boot option. The next thought was to somehow > watch the connections to the tftp server where the boot image will be kept > and watch for the client IP then have the PXE server create a new firewall > rule that would block access from that client to tftp. The thought there is > that once the client has downloaded the boot image once it will run it and > then on reboot will not be able to find the boot image and, I think, would > fail at the pxe boot and move on to the next item in the boot list. Then > every midnight the list of blocked IPs would be cleared and we start the > process over again. > > So any suggestions on the best way to take a bootable DOS disk and turn it > into an image that a Linux based PXE server can serve, ways to monitor the > tftp connections and then add them to the firewall after they have finished > downloading the boot image, and any ideas on any better ideas would be > appreciated. > > Thanks for taking the time to read this. > > Rob > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > -- Alain Spineux aspineux gmail com May the sources be with you