Southern Bread

While I was figuring out how to boot SpinRite over PXE, it never actually dawned on me to just Google for “spinrite pxe”. But, I happened to use it on a laptop this morning and it crossed my mind to do so. Turns out that another guy had done it already back in 2007! Man, don’t you just love wasting your time re-inventing the wheel. Oh well. Looks like he used the exact same approach I did, except he took the SpinRite boot image straight from SpinRite itself. I built my own FreeDos image instead, because I found that using the one that Steve generates would frequently cause graphics mode issues when it displays the srsplash.sys file. When exiting SpinRite it would just dump you to a white screen in some wierd VESA mode. Also the custom boot image will auto-reboot after exiting SpinRite.

But, just wanted to give kudos to him for his work: Nearband Networks Blog.

On a side note, this also shows how easy it is in the IT field to inadvertently duplicate someone’s work and never even know it. This is especially true with software development. Copyrights should be for products, not processes. The classic example: Carmack’s Reverse.