HOWTO: Use LiveCD in PXE booting environment

Kalin

Hello!

I am proud with myself, because after a few sleepless nights, I could convert the LiveCD 2004.2 so that it can be booted via PXE. I neede this in order to boot my Toshiba SS/S5 (PORTEGE 2001) laptop, as it does not have (bootable) drive, but has Intel PXE built in. (Another way was to boot from USB FDD, but I just hate diskettes (lately)).

After a long search and a lot of reading, I decided to start from here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=151242, but due to some problems like the new format of the LiveCD (squashfs support, etc) I had a hard time. Now that everyhting seems to work, I decided to write this short HOWTO.

I had to patch the linuxrc script found on the LiveCD with two patches. The first is to make it boot from PXE and the second is adding a default parameter for keymap (may be not needed on normal boot). Patches are available separately from ftp://ftp.tar.bz/pub/my_software/LiveCD+PXE/misc/ for review.

First setup the server for DHCP and tftp. On your PXE-to-be server do (as root):

LinuxRocks · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2003 Posts: 397 Location: New Mexico

Very nice. I want to try this as soon as I can. I needed something like this this last weekend, but unfortunatly, I didnt know it existed and used a flash rom to install the base system (My mobo has a flash reader builtin and was able to boot from it).

This will be very handy as we plan to migrate several servers and machines over to Linux.

Thanks a million

Joe

someguy · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 10:17 am Post subject:

i cant get the file from your server keeps sqaying file doesnt exist or may be moved hope you can get it back up being as id like to use this lol :-P

thanks buddy
_________________
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

troffe · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 1:55 pm Post subject:

Hi All,

Thanks for the howto, it had some good infomation. i like you had to PXE boot my system to install gentoo. although i did'it using a Knoppix Live CD and the Knoppix Terminal Server (PXE booting my laptop off my deskyop computer) and then used the alternative installation guide
( http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml#doc_chap3 ) .

worked a dream, on my IBM Thinkpad X24 and Compaq EN 733. i have also used it on a large amount of different hardware with no problems including H(D)ell's

Kalin · Posted: Wed Sep 08, 2004 11:24 pm Post subject:

Hmm, sorry about my server not responding, it was down for some unknown reason, checking it now.
At the moment it should work.

troffe, the alternative instal guide had some good info as well, I just wanted to use the LiveCD (i.e. not make another system).

someguy, please try to get the files again, sorry :-|

Lightspeed · n00b Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 57 Location: UK

Hi there, nice to see that my initial effort with the 2004.0 Live CD has proved to be useful

Last week I did actually update my own procedure to work with the slightly changed format of the 2004.2 CD, though I didn't get round to posting the changes here - and I used it to install gentoo on my lovely new Centrino laptop (it does actually have a CD drive, but I find it more fun to use PXE!).

Anyway, by the looks of things your script for modifying the CD etc seems a lot more organised than the poor explanation I gave in my earlier thread, though I haven't got round to trying yours out yet.

Considering that this really doesn't require much alteration to the standard Live CD in order to get it to work, it would be nice if it could eventually become a supported installation option.

Regarding your TODO list... I see no reason why this won't already work with the minimal iso, so I don't think #3 is a problem.

someguy · Posted: Mon Sep 20, 2004 4:05 am Post subject:

thanks
_________________
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
while [ 1 ] ; do echo "*" | telnet ip.of.print.er 9100 ; done

Dragonlord · Guru Joined: 22 Aug 2004 Posts: 446 Location: Switzerland

tried this out on my machine because i need to setup my new server on a machine i've no floppy and cdrom on it.

the old-server hosts the DHCP/TFTP and the new server should boot-install from it.

now i tried everything to no avail. whenever i boot from my new server i either get a kernel panic with something like "root=NULL is not valid" or such a crap or i get some hang with "unsupported fs" or something along that (sorry for the lack of info but it's 5am here and still no solution).

i guess the problem must be in the grub.lst file i need to get the pxegrub bootloader fired up. the loader works and he also fetches the image (i spezified the smp image from the livecd manipulated with your script) but during boot it hangs.

that's my grub.lst... wtf is not correct on this one? i've copied this one together snooping on the livecd but somehow shit works.

vh1 · n00b Joined: 04 Apr 2006 Posts: 1

hey there

with minor modifications I've gotten your script to run on my ubuntu (breezy) system with the minimal cd. it was very simple, instances of livecd.squashfs had to be changed to image.squashfs and I had to use cpio instead of mounting the "old" kernel image" snf everything builds fine.

using pxelinux I can get the desired computer to boot and download the gentoo.igz file, but then it complains about there being no init found and suggest I put an init option in my boot options. but the problem is, that exists

pentium4borg · n00b Joined: 29 Aug 2006 Posts: 47

I have the same problem as vh1. Can anyone provide insight? Are there other methods for booting a Gentoo LiveCD image over PXE?

Kalin · Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2007 2:07 pm Post subject: Need info!

Well, if you post a bit more info, like more of the MSGs that are shown on the screen, etc. I might be able to help you.

pentium4borg · n00b Joined: 29 Aug 2006 Posts: 47

I finally figured out how to modify the LiveCD to boot over PXE. I was going to past a few days ago, but I've been in and out.

I did some searching and after some trial and error I got through the problems I was having, thanks in part to the original patch provided by Kalin. gentoo.igz is a multipart cpio archive, which the cpio I had (2.7-r1) didn't like, but I was able to get this to work using cpio-2.6-r5. I extracted and made a patch for the linuxrc file that allows the system to boot from the squashfs when image.squashfs is put inside gentoo.igz.

I wrote a script that does everything for you with the 2006.1 LiveCD. It's attached in a tar file along with the patch. Remember to have cpio-2.6-r5 installed when you run this, for some reason 2.7-r1 doesn't like the multipart archive: