This example of the upgrade uses 54820A with K6-2 Award motherboard. Older motherboards within same scope line may have not enough free PCI slots to accomodate PCI network card replacement, in this case, ISA-based 3C509 could be used. The upgrade itself is quite simple - if the scope already has Realtek card with populated CDIP28 or CDIP32 socket, it`s probably 8139 variant and all you may need is to write (E)EPROM to have network boot feature. Please consider following points before choosing E(E)PROM chip: - eBay purchase, especially from China, could deliver you a fake chip - not to mention it would not work, but worse, with completely different die packed inside. This relates to 5V EEPROM as they cost more than ERPOM due to erase circuitry, situation with EPROM chips is somewhat better, I`ve not seen reports over fake devices, you may receive defective or used unit marked as new, - don`t go for larger chip even if the cost is negligible - there are known limitations for some cards, for example, 8139 variants may not support chips larger that 128K, known upper limit for 3C509 is 64K; if you happen to already have bigger chip, try to write boot code to upper and lower chip halves, it may work but I`ve personally never tested this. After upgrading or replacing the card you may want to toggle 'Boot network first' option in the Features menu in the BIOS. File 'ipxe-general.h' shows sample configuration which fits under 64K with modern iPXE (remember to preserve #undef TIVOLI_VMM_WORKAROUND as it requires working fxstor/ fxload which may not be presented in the particular CPU in your scope). If iPXE is working after ROM installation, you could use it for scope image management and/or backups. As of linux kernel 3.2, the scope IDE controller doesn`t work well with UDMA/66 transfer rates, the user must either 'warm up' the drive by doing few reads, like reading first 256Mb, to allow libata degrade transfer speed to UDMA/33 or to specify libata.force=40c for the kernel. After moving to UDMA/33, no bus resets and data corruption has been observed.