PXE boot, how can i do it

I wish to try a little experiment. I recently upgraded my media server, and now that it is ddr2 I have stuffed it with the remainder of my unused ram. it now has 2.5gigs. It is connected directly to my main rig via a gigabit connection, with all of its drives shared. I have created a ramdisk using a simple program i found on google of 2gigs, which is enough to install an os on. What I want to do is keep an os image loaded on the media server ramdisk and boot off of it using my main rig. Its a cheap and more effective knock off of gigabytes iRam and would be an interesting experiment.

both rigs are pxe capable. The server is currently running win2k server and the main rig is windows vista ultimate, I would like to install windows xp for this test.

is this possible, and how can I do it

Kinda pointless since you're booting from the host server, you can't save anything on the image from the client side. Plus it'll take awhile to load any image 100+MB even on a gigabit connection since the host has to transfer the image completely to the client before it boots.

If you really want to then here's the "gist" of it:

1. have a tftpd server on the host

2. config tftpd for dhcp (assuming comps are on the same network) to boot into pxelinux

3. config the pxelinux for the image you want to boot off of

4. turn on the machine to boot from pxe while tftpd server is running on host

5 .voila, it should boot to the menu to pick your image


Some things you'd want to google: tftpd32, pxelinux, and pxe boot

Have fun =)


BTW: The image has to be a "live" image where windows is already installed so when you boot from the image, it'll go directly to OS. Cannot be a boot image to install windows becuase:

1. You'll have to reinstall windows everytime you load the image (if it is a install/boot image)as mentioned above, you cant save the image since ramdisk will erase everything on shutdown/reset since info is stored on RAM.

2. PXE will not load boot/install images unless its a PE image so you can't load a boot/install cd image. You have to go through a Preboot Environment. Dunno why, but that's the way PXE is.