[syslinux] Windows PE booting without chainloading ipxe

[Luke Ledgerd]

I have an interest in booting Windows PE from PXELinux, and it seems that wimboot from ipxe project is the solution.
http://ipxe.org/wimboot

MENU LABEL Windows 8.1 Enterprise PE Rescue (wimboot)
com32 linux.c32 /wimboot
APPEND initrdfile=/windows/win81/bootmgr,/windows/win81/boot/bcd,/windows/win81/boot/boot.sdi,/windows/win81/sources/boot.wim

The initrdfile= is supported in Syslinux from patches to5.03 onwards on the mailing list but it seems wimboot has moved on from last year so the documentation on various blogs saying this can be done is obsolete.
http://www.syslinux.org/archives/2012-October/018708.html

What I'm trying to do is outlined here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/162070/it-geek-how-to-network-boot-pxe-the-winpe-recovery-disk-with-pxelinux-v5-wimboot/

Cmdline.c in wmiboot is not happy, it's freaking out at the presence of the initrdfile= option in the boot arguments.
This I'll patch now and see what happens.
I'm going to go onto the ipxe chainloading way of solving this problem if I can't patch wimboot into submission.

I just thought I'd let you know that it would be great if you developers could add an INITRDFILE option to the syslinux config that loads raw initrd disks the ipxe way, without appending stuff to the kernel boot argument. That way an unpatched wimboot from ipxe could be made to work.

Cheers,

Luke




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