[syslinux] failed when boot the kernel image on the hard disk from syslinux on a floppy

[H. Peter Anvin]

Vance Turner wrote:
> Peter, I am trying to find someone at Microsoft that can speak to the
> technical issues of RIS and Windows Deployment Toolkit 2008. Seems they
> are clueless as to this in general. I am to the point of pulling my hair
> out on this stuff.
> 
> With the advent of iSCSI, why can't we just modify pxelinux to be iSCSI
> aware, and we can define the CD Images as iSCSI targets on some
> directory structure. There we can also point to some generic install
> script to fire off the automated installation. Kickstart, and Yast are
> already there for Linux RHEL and SUSE, Solaris would fit into this
> easily, Windows wouldn't even know it was a network install.
> 
> Have you looked into this?

gPXE/gpxelinux.0 already support iSCSI, although I don't know if it 
contains the code necessary to boot from a CD-ROM image over iSCSI.

However, the problem still is all the same: if the OS you're trying to 
boot doesn't have the appropriate drivers and/or doesn't handle CD-ROM 
off the transport (in this case iSCSI) it doesn't do anything.

I don't know which operating systems, if any, would support CD-ROMs over 
iSCSI.  They would obviously have to be quite new, but if this is a 
feature that is getting common, then it would be easy enough to add the 
handful of extra support one would need to deal with El Torito... like 
anything else, though, it's a "simple matter of programming."

	-hpa