[ale] PXE Boot from CD?

Christopher Bergeron christopher at bergeron.com
Thu Jul 12 00:27:08 EDT 2007


You could mount a bootable ISO using loopback and modify it to your  
liking and the burn it back down to a cdrom.

I think xubuntu has an iso that would good for that.  You just mount  
it with:
mount -t loop /dev/cdrom /mnt/whatever

modify the contents of the filesystem to your liking (including  
PCMCIA drivers; chroot will help you figure out when it's right), and  
then save that directory as an ISO.  Burn that iso down to a CD and  
you should be in good form.

kind regards,
cb






On Jul 11, 2007, at 3:16 PM, David Tomaschik wrote:

> Brian Pitts wrote:
>> David Tomaschik wrote:
>>
>>> I have an old (P2, IIRC) notebook computer with a dud hard drive  
>>> that's
>>> just been sitting around.  While it's not that critical, I  
>>> thought it
>>> would be fun to get it working (at least somewhat).  My thoughts  
>>> were to
>>> get it to PXE boot with NFS root off my home lan server (which has
>>> plenty of disk space).  Unfortunately, it has no integrated network,
>>> only a PCMCIA network card (obviously not directly bootable).  So I
>>> thought there might be a LiveCD of some sort available to allow PXE
>>> booting.  It seems fairly simple, but googling has found lots of  
>>> people
>>> asking about it, but little in the way of direct answers.
>>>
>>
>> Try generating an iso from http://rom-o-matic.net/5.4.3/ if you know
>> your NIC type.
>>
>> -Brian
>>
>>
>
> Unfortunately, Etherboot does not support PCMCIA NICs, so that  
> isn't an
> option.  I've looked at PXELINUX, but the more I think about it, if  
> I'm
> going to boot from a CD, I should be able to slap a kernel and  
> isolinux
> on there, boot from that kernel and initrd, and pivot_root to an NFS
> root.  I'm probably missing something here, but it seems like that  
> would
> work.  Either that or go the CF-44 pin IDE route.
>
> David
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