Emulate Media to boot ISOs over network, it's possible??

[angoll]

Hi,

I set up a ipxe server, and it's great, but I wanted mostly to be able to install windows, some linux distros and other utilities.

The problem I found is I can't use the ISO directly, one "solution" would be to use memdisk to load the ISO to memory and boot from there, I read some linux distributions don't work.

I was thinking if any way to create a virtual disk over the network and appear as a real one. A lot of problems reside when a modern OS do a hardware test and try to find the memdisk, this is not found. Or we use a lot of ram for having all the iso in memory.

I think the problem can be splited in two questions:
1) Is any way or possible to create a virtual media that a hardware test find as an actual media?
2) If so I can assume we can make it to map the content to memory or a network media? (nfs,iscsi,AoE)

Thanks in advance!

[robinsmidsrod]

A lot of ISOs can't be netbooted directly. You'll need to unpack the ISO and boot the kernel directly and specify where to find the squashfs or whatever other file is needed for the boot to continue. This is kernel/initrd-specific and you'll need to carefully look at the documentation for the ISO you're trying to get to work or (last effort) look at the initrd scripts to figure out how to do it. In most situations you can find out a lot by looking at the syslinux config files on the ISO.