[syslinux] PXE, Grub, MEMDISK, Bochs and a 10Meg image.

demolishun demolishun at mcleodusa.net
Sun Feb 15 21:14:01 PST 2004


Hello everyone,
Let me tell you what I have and you can tell me what I am doing wrong.

I have a Linux system that uses DHCP with TFTP to serve up images for 
booting with a PXE client.  That part works.  I can boot a PXE client 
using a floppy image created using dd.

What does not work is a 10 megabyte image I created using Bochs tools 
and testing in Bochs.  If I understand correctly Bochs uses the mtools 
format for drive images.  I have been able to get this image to boot on 
the Bochs emulator.  In addition I added a lilo bootloader to the image 
and this works as well.

When I serve up this concoction to the PXE client it will actually show 
the boot loader.  However, if I select the only option available called 
"other" it quickly gives me the message "Disk I/O error Replace the 
disk, and then press any key".  The memdisk client shows all the correct 
geometry for the drive before it tries to boot on the client, but it 
just dies.  I did everything I could under Bochs to get it to be a 
legitimate image.  It is set as the primary partition, I used fdisk /mbr 
and lots of other stuff to make sure it would be accepted.

If anyone is interested I can send them a compressed copy of it.  It 
should be pretty small once compressed.

Thanks,
Frank Carney




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