booting with a network cable plugged in

[yawnmoth]

I'm trying to reboot a ThinkPad R40 of mine with the 100mbit ethernet cable plugged in and am having some problems. Basically, whenever I attempt to boot it up, I get the following message:

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Intel(R) Boot Agent Version 4.1.07
Copyright (C) 1997-2002, Intel Corporation

Intel Base-Code, PXE-2.1 (build 083)
Copyright (C) 1997-2002, Intel Corporation

CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 06 1B D0 41 10 GUID: 1D548481 2DD5 11C6 80DE 8EE28DC59A3F
PXE-E53: No boot filename received

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.
Operating System not found

Midway through that message it pauses, saying that it's checking for a DHCP signal or something but then proceeds to print out the rest of the message, overwritting the DHCP message.

Anyway, this is kinda an annoying problem. My current solution is to just unplug it when rebooting it but I'd prefer not to do this. So... any ideas?

[dsvochak]

It sounds like you've somehow gotten the BIOS to set the boot agent as a boot device before the hard drive.

[GomJabbar]

While this is really beyond my expertise, I would guess that your laptop is trying to boot off of the LAN first. Look in the BIOS menu under Startup and make sure your hard drive - IDE HDD0 is higher up the list than PCI LAN

[yawnmoth]

The Boot / Network order in the BIOS had been as follows:

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-Removable Devices
	Legacy Floppy Drives
-Hard Drive
	(some random string)
 CD-ROM Drive
 IBA 4.1.07 Slot 0240

It now reads more like this:

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-Hard Drive
	(some random string)
 CD-ROM Drive
-Removable Devices
	Legacy Floppy Drives
 IBA 4.1.07 Slot 0240

...and now it seems to work. I thought I had tried changing those options before, but I guess I didn't... ah well. Thanks for the tips

[jdhurst]

Since your network boot was apparently at the bottom (and therefore appears not to be the issue), it looks like it thinks it has a floppy disk and it can't deal with it, causing it to error out.

The way you have set it, you cannot boot the machine from the floppy drive. It may be that your machine needs service.
... JD Hurst

[yawnmoth]

My machine was actually serviced not to long ago (the mobo - "planar" as they call it - was replaced)... is it possible that maybe the person doing the service changed some of the bios settings to better test it and forget to change them back?

[Kyocera]

what happens when you remove the ethernet cable? will it boot at all.