Booting to local partition / Boot grub from Pxe

[TcShadowWalker]

Hey,

I plan to deploy iPxe to my machines.
Since I can't flash it into the NIC, I will boot iPxe from grub, no problem so far.
IPxe fetches a script from the server via https and I got that part working nicely.
However, I will then need to be able to boot from a local partition: I know I can use 'sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x80'. But that just reloads grub from the MBR.
If iPxe is the default entry, this will boot iPxe again and I have a boot-loop.

Is there a way to directly boot a kernel from a local partition? I did not find anything in the command list, so probably not, since Ipxe probably does not understand how to read those filesystems.

Alternatively, is there a way to boot into a grub image on the PXE server?
I tried to generate a grub pxeboot image, using

Code:

grub-mknetdir --net-directory=/tftpboot/ --subdir=grubpxe

And then booting that entry via http with:

Code:

kernel http://.../files/grubpxe/i386-pc/core.0
boot

Grub starts, but reports 'error: file not found' and then goes into a rescue console.
If I could load a grub menu from the server, I will then be able to boot from a local partition.

Any help is appreciated

[NiKiZe]

As you note, iPXE have no support for reading local disks.

I have not played much with Grub in this context... can you load your configuration as an initrd before loading grub itself. You probably do not want to have an pxe aware grub at all.
An alternative might be to use syslinux.

All this assuming legacy, and not EFI