Booting BIOS Flash images via iPXE

[robinsmidsrod]

(2013-08-28 17:35)cpdohert Wrote:  Necro-ing the thread because I'm trying to make the same thing work.

I have a bunch of floppy disk images for flashing the BIOS on HP enterprise laptops. I'm trying to boot these over iPXE.

We have a Microsoft DHCP server configured per http://ipxe.org/howto/msdhcp. That's working fine.

Following the instructions above, I'm executing the following commands:

Code:

iPXE> dhcp
DHCP (...) .....ok
iPXE> sanboot --nodescribe --drive 0x00 http://ipxe.internal.url/8440w/FreeDOS-8440w-BIOS-Flash.img

and I get this:

Code:

Registered SAN device 0x00
Booting from SAN device 0x00
FreeDOS

and then it just hangs there permanently.

These floppy disk images work fine on a syslinux 4.02 pxe boot server.

The parameter to sanboot is --no-describe, but this shouldn't really matter in your case. Is the .img file the raw floppy image, and not compressed in any way? sanboot doesn't support compressed images, like memdisk does.

If this image boots with syslinux, I'm assuming you're using memdisk to load it. If you try to load the same floppy image using memdisk via ipxe, does it load properly? In iPXE you just load memdisk normally with the floppy image specified as an initrd, e.g. like I do here: https://gist.github.com/robinsmidsrod/22...-ipxe-L139