[syslinux] PXE menu file problem

behrad at rayavaran.com behrad at rayavaran.com
Wed Sep 27 23:23:45 PDT 2006


Actually I am  eager to replace old PXE.mnu by PXE Linux completely but these problems forced me to use pxeLinux for loading WinPE and then redirect it to pxe.mnu for the rest of the jobs. The problems which I've sent before was as follows:

1) LocalBoot is not working well. It has different behaviour on different PCs. On some it works, on some it hangs, on some it goes back to menu and on some the PC resets. I used chain and it was the same. PXE.mnu works well on all these machines.

2) When you boot a DOS image floppy, you do some job and then you need to continue the localboot. 3COM had a utility name PBOOT.exe for this purpose.

3) On DOS floppies you need to have DHCP options (IP, name server, ...) and MAC address and ... There is a utility BpPatch.exe in 3COM collection which replaces a batch file and insert this values in them. 

(I couldn't find anything similar to BpPatch and PBOOT in pxelinux collection.)

Meanwhile I think the problem around chaining from pxelinux to pxe.mnu is something in pxelinux because pxe.mnu works well when specified directly as bootfile in DHCP options. If pxelinux does a clear chaing to another program like when it does it to startrom.0 then pxe.mnu should work well.

Behrad


-----Original Message-----
From: H. Peter Anvin [mailto:hpa at zytor.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 8:47 AM
To: ????? ???????
Cc: stappers at stappers.nl; syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [syslinux] PXE menu file problem

behrad at rayavaran.com wrote:
> As a matter of fact, pxelinux can execute pxe.mnu if you named it pxe.0. The pxe.0 menu appear but when the user choose any floppy image file or even want to localboot from the menu, system resets. This is not happen when pxe.mnu is directly loaded without intermediation of pxelinux.0.
> 
> I think there is an important bug in pxelinux. Maybe it hooks some interrupts and doesn't roll them back or something similar in memory location it loads.
> 
> Learning is enjoyful but you will enjoy it more if you can do the job! I hope HPA helps!

Well, it's really hard to know without knowing how this software chain virtualizes disk images.  Since I have a menu system and MEMDISK which I support already, I'm less concerned about a closed-source one which I can't look at.

	-hpa




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