[syslinux] Howto create hd image with bootable (Free)DOS system

[Ian McDonald]

Dominik Fischer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have to update the BIOS of several hundreds of geographically
> distributed PCs.
> Since we are using PXELINUX for years to install the OS (Linux) on this
> PCs PXELINUX is my
> first choice for doing this job.
> 
> The vendor of this PCs provides a bootable ISO image for the update.
> Because of the size of the
> firmware it is not possible to use a FD image (not even 2.88MB).  But in
> the documentation
> of PXELINUX there's a hint that bootable hd images are also supported by
> PXELINUX.
> 
> I've no success on creating such an image so far. Does anyone have
> successfull created such an
> image and can give me a short howto for this?
> 
> Kind regards,
> Dominik
> 
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> 

Out of interest, what vendor is this? (and what on earth bios is so huge?)

We use 2.88's fairly extensively to boot UNDI networked dos images to 
flash our bioses on our classroom boxes, so we can pull an uri in our 
install system before rebooting the machine.

I seem to remember some success making a vmware instance with a small 
hard disk image (say 40M), then booting it to a shell off the network, 
and using dd to make an image of the disk (bootloader and all) to feed 
memdisk.

However, it's a long time since I did this, so my memory might be faulty.

--
ian