[syslinux] Get MEMDISK parameters from WinPE 32/64-bit?

[Lindgren Daniel]

> Alternatively, does Windows 7 not provide a PXE boot-loader at all?
> BOOTMGR or something?  I would find that difficult to 
> believe, but it's possible.  If it does, you can continue to 
> use PXELINUX and can chain to the Windows 7 PE (3.0) using 
> the pxechain.com included with Syslinux.
> If you can pass parameters to the PXE-style BOOTMGR 
> counterpart (whatever its modern incarnation is), you might 
> be able to gather those parameters from the booted Registry.  
> For XP/2003, the TXTSETUP.SIF/BOOT.INI parameters are passed 
> at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ :
> SystemStartOptions.

You can PXE boot WinPE using pxeboot.com (from Microsoft) as kernel and
WIM files, but you must have a "Boot" directory in the root of the
tftpboot directory (hardcoded, can't be moved or renamed), which means
it isn't easily multiplied if you want to be able to boot several
different WinPE versions/generations/architectures.

When memdisk got ISO support I immediately abandoned MS approach since
using WinPE ISO files makes them completely independent of each other.
Adding gpxelinux.0 to the mix gives me the opportunity to inject DHCP
options 209 and 210 for pxelinux.0 to use HTTP to transfer the ISO
files, speeding it up roughly 5-6 times compared to TFTP. As far as I
know, HTTP is not supported by Microsofts pxeboot.com.

Gpxelinux also makes it possible to dynamically generate those DHCP
settings to control which server the files should be fetched from, based
on the IP-adress of the client, a feature that makes it easy to always
use the closest (fastest) server available without having to configure
every scope on the DHCP server (we have hundreds).

Cheers,
Daniel