[syslinux] Disk preparation

[Andrew Wray]

I'm trying to move off of bpbatch and on to pxelinux (bpbatch doesn't boot
the installation kernels for SuSE 8.1 and SLES 8--they appear to be too
big).  This has been a pretty easy transition, except for the fact that I'm
using bpbatch to install Windows 2000 over the network as well as Linux.
For Windows 2000 I use a DOS boot diskette with network drivers and run the
16-bit WINNT.EXE program which copies the source files onto the C: drive on
the target system.  The catch is that the C: drive may or may not exist
when I start this process (it needs to be a DOS FAT partition)--that is, I
can't make any assumptions about the current state of the drive in the
target system.  Of course I can go through multiple boots, partitioning and
formatting the system, then rebooting the DOS diskette over the network and
starting the install process then, but right now I'm not saving any state
information on the server, and am initiating the network boot locally
through a interactive key pressed during POST on the system, and I'd like
to make this process as unattended as possible.  With bpbatch I can handle
this very nicely since bpbatch can partition and format a drive before the
OS ever loads.  This means I only have to boot the DOS diskette image over
the network once.

Now, I know this is asking a lot, but is there any chance this type of
functionality might be added to pxelinux in the future?


Thanks,

Andy Wray