Booting from network

Ok, so...

Say you have a netbook w/o a cdrom or floppy drive. You want to run a bootable CD.

Is there a way to boot over the network and boot an image of a bootable cd contained on another machine (nfs or samba shared)?

Say I want to start up this machine and run a system restore, a linux installer, a windows installer... is this possible to configure, and if so, what should I be looking at?

It seems it has something to do with PXE... but I can't seem to find any good explanations really.

MRD said:

Ok, so...

Say you have a netbook w/o a cdrom or floppy drive. You want to run a bootable CD.

Is there a way to boot over the network and boot an image of a bootable cd contained on another machine (nfs or samba shared)?

Say I want to start up this machine and run a system restore, a linux installer, a windows installer... is this possible to configure, and if so, what should I be looking at?

It seems it has something to do with PXE... but I can't seem to find any good explanations really.

Click to expand...

Can you install gentoo from a flash drive? I know my coworker installed Debian on his netbook from a usb drive.

We have a net install environment for our servers at work. When you boot from the network it presents you with a menu showing a list of images. We have three: Dban, FreeBSD 7.0 (custom image) and Debian Stable (custom image). You select the image and it starts the install, or runs dban. I can ask our systems guy some of the specifics tomorrow at work.

You can install Gentoo from a usb flash drive, but I'm looking for a general solution that will allow me to boot any optical disk image (or even floppy disk image). You can install Gentoo from just about anything.

The menu you describe sounds like exactly what I want actually.

I think what you want is GRUB with PXE,

http://grub.enbug.org/PXEBOOT

http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml

I've fooled around with UDA and IF my memory isnt totally gone (it probally is) I think that I had a VM pxe booting a iso. Take a look at this one also.

http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/

I've got a couple of old fujitsu tablets and small fujitsu notebooks without a way to boot from cd or usb, and was looking into uda to load a low resource linux install. Just never got around to trying it out all the way.

I'm also interested in this.

I haven't done this and don't know a whole lot... But if you want to do this I believe you want to get a PXE boot server running on your network. The instructions at the following link are distro-specific, but from the Linux advice I've seen out of you in the past, you can probably generalize them and pull out the relevant parts for yourself. If nothing else, this should give you a framework of how this works on the server side:

http://linux-sxs.org/internet_serving/pxeboot.html

This is probably useful also, tho it mostly focuses on the client side of your question:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml