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Situation: I have an old rack server that I want to use as a test machine. The BIOS does not support network boot, and cannot be upgraded. I need to install a fresh OS on it.

Is there anything I can install (or better, a live CD I can boot from), that would enable me to perform a once-only PXE-boot to load one of our standard OS images on the server?

Note: This question does NOT ask how to set up a PXE-boot server. That's already done, and works fine for any machine whose BIOS supports boot from network. All I'm looking for is a way of achieving the same thing without requiring BIOS support.

3 Answers3

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There is this thing called gpxe (read about it here), which allows you to load the PXE stuff from a floppy, for example.

wzzrd
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http://rom-o-matic.net/ is a site where you can generate bootable images for performing pxe boot. Another alternative is to stick another network card in the machine that does have a boot ROM. You can just use it for network booting, and then use the other network interface for all other network activities.

BTW, there is a pretty good (geeky) Google Tech Talk about gPXE:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1911723796712805715

Chad Huneycutt
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http://ipxe.org/ will also help you in case you have a pc that doesn't already support pxe. There you get a bootable iso image, so if your pc can boot a cdrom, you can boot over pxe!

karlnabb
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    iPXE used to be called gPXE, which used to be called Etherboot. Same thing as wzzrd's answer. – Chris S Jul 17 '11 at 03:44