[syslinux] Adding memdisk or similar when booting linux

[Harald_Jensas at Dell.com]

Hi Kjetil,

I used ISOLINUX, MEMDISK and SYSLINUX to load drivers disk for Windows using MEMDISK in a tool I made a few years back.

What I did was:

- ISOLINUX loads MEMDISK and a gzipped floppy image and boots the A: floppy image.
- Floppy image has SYSLINUX that in my case load another floppy image using MEMDISK to create a virtual B: drive.
(The reason for loading MEMDISK twice in my case is because of a special case in how the Windows installer handles B: drives with driver disks inserted.)
- The B: floppy image boots and also run SYSLINUX wich kick of a bootloader that let me change CD and boot from the new CD inserted, im my case this is the Windows 2k3 installation media.

You should be able to do something similar like:

- PXELINUX loads MEMDISK and a gzipped floppy image and boots the A: floppy image. This image contain your driver disk and SYSLINUX+MEMDISK+"Floppy bootable ROM Image".
- SYSLINUX could then load MEMDISK that in turn loads and boots the "Floppy bootable ROM Image".
- The "Floppy bootable ROM Image" will now do another PXE boot.

You can also configure the bootfile loaded by the Floppy bootable ROM Image when this is created. E.g overriding the bootfile specified in your DHCP config. E.g the NIC PXE boot get the bootfile info from DHCP wich is tftp://server/loadddisk/pxelinux.0 which load MEMDISK and then the Floppy bootable ROM Image will load tftp://server/installer/pxelinux.0 which in turn start the kernel/initrd for OS installation.


I would'nt call this clean, but it should work... :)


\\
Harald Jensås


> -----Original Message-----
> From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On
> Behalf Of Kjetil.Mikkelborg at kongsberg.com
> Sent: 13 March 2008 11:13
> To: SYSLINUX at zytor.com
> Subject: [syslinux] Adding memdisk or similar when booting linux
> 
> Hi
> 
> Thanx guys for the help on understanding howto read dmi info!
> I now have a custom boot menu for install of different linux versions
> based if they have been installed before (reinstall is ok for users,
> first install is not), and installquirks like if we detect odd
> hardware, we add install options to redhat installer so it can install
> anyhow (for instance hp dc7800 who needs pci=nommconf as kernel append
> for booting).
> 
> But now I need to add a driver disk to my install enviroment, and when
> thinking about it, the nice method would be having syslinux create a
> memdisk which linux could see when starting install, and load its
> drivers from there. The reason i need a memdisk image (or similar), is
> since often the driver I need is a network driver, which offcourse is a
> tad difficult getting from the net _After_ the kernel have taken over.
> 
> Embedding the initrd would be an option, but would require me to change
> all install initrd's for every driver I put in my driver disk, and also
> it would require me to also allways modify new releases with custom
> initrd. But with a memdisk approach, the only image who would need
> attention would be the driver disk image alone (which actually supports
> multi versions)
> 
> Is there any clean approches to achive this? like starting first
> memdisk, load a image to it, and then start linux (all thru pxelinux?)
> 
> --Kjetil
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