How to boot ISO image using gpxe and memdisk?

I have a repository of an ISO images (many different OS installers in ISO format) under http://myrepos/*.iso. I would like to boot from that repo using gPXE (with/without memdisk if necessary) and httpfs. I don't want to extract those ISO images. It should work similarly to netboot.me or boot.kernel.org but using whole ISO images. Is it possible to load whole ISO image through gPXE? How to do that?


I believe you can do this by pxe booting memdisk as the kernel and specifying the iso file as the initrd.

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK

I'm not entirely sure that you will be able to do this completely over http, you may need tftp support in that repo directory.

Further information:

http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/bootingmemdisk


Yes you can use gpxe instead of pxe for http support (instead of slow tftp). You can chainload gpxe from pxe (means any existing netboot rom can load up gpxe).

For my system I use pxe boot menu so my CD entries look like:

label f6
    menu label ^4)  UBCD
    kernel Kernek/memdisk (or http://192.168.10.1/Kernel/memdisk)
    append iso initrd=192.168.10.1/Images/ubcd.iso

I see this topic is rather dated, but after searching so much for similar help I feel that now I am have figured my boot server out I'm going to try to share info wherever possible.


I recommend you to use Grub4dos instead of Memdisk for less memory comsumption. Load grub.exe than the iso image, map it with (0xff) direction.

I found a full article here : [dead link]

Hope it will hope you.