g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.
I wanted to include g4u in a multiboot cd. This multiboot cd is based on isolinux and contains memdisk as program to load an image file in RAM from which can be booted. Because g4u contains of more than 1 floppy, I could boot from the first floppy, but I couldn't switch to the following floppy like with physical floppies.
I made a large floppy image. I stripped down a version of FreeDOS so only the essential files are available. I added bsdboot.com. This programs allows to boot the NetBSD kernel of g4u from dos. I edited the fdconfig.sys and fdauto.bat to pass the correct arguments to bsdboot.com.
See the README for more information. README.txt
Download the complete archive: g4u-build-image.tar.gz