[syslinux] PXELinux with 3C509 and mba-on-disk or with vmware

[Giulio Orsero]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2003 13:36:31 +0200, Andrea Rossato
<mailing_list at istitutocolli.org> wrote:


>3C509B ISA card. I boot the later with a floppy bootable rom image taken 
>from http://www.rom-o-matic.net/
>Everything is working just fine. I decided to try to set up a PXE 


>1. With the 3C509B ISA card
>disk kit: that allows you to create a bootable disk for network booting 
>(http://www.3com.com/products/en_US/result.jsp?selected=5&sort=effdt&order=desc&sku=3CMBA-D). 
>It offers the possibility to use different boot methods, among which PXE 
>and tcp/ip with dhcp.
>If I create a disk with PXE the system seems  to boot: a mba disk loader 
>appears, followed by a screen with copyrights (by Intel 3com etc). After 
>that everything stops with an 'unable to read from media' message.
Did you see discover messages in the dhcp server message log? Have you
configured appropriate etherboot images (when using rom-o-matic I assume you
created a straight etherboot image, while with pxe you need an image which
will overlay the client pxe).
However, the 00000 as mac address is not encouraging.


>2. with vmware
>According to 
>http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/2003-May/002043.html, even 
>though vmware has not a pxe capable bios, using a M$ RIS boot disk, that 
>is a PXE stack on disk, you should be able to boot a VM.

>Given this information do you thing I'm soffering of a configuration 
>problem somewhere? Any idea, suggestion? I searched the net without 
>finding any useful answer.
>Any clue would be greatly appreciated.
Cannot help with RIS, however see
http://www.emboot.com/vmware/
for vmware pxe.
They have a trial version, I tried it and it works fine with pxelinux.

-- 
giulioo at pobox.com