PXE booting .IMG and .DD images

ddpxe-boot

I have read many forum posts but still can't PXE boot image files.

usb-image.dd is my image file. Instead of using USB sticks I would like to boot live Linux by using PXE.

DEFAULT menu.c32
PROMPT 0
timeout 300

MENU TITLE PXE Menu

LABEL memtest86
 MENU LABEL Memtest86+ 5.01
 KERNEL /memtest/memtest86+-5.01

LABEL Live Linux
 MENU LABEL Live Linux test
 KERNEL memdisk
 APPEND initrd=/test/usb-image.dd

PXE Menu is working and I can boot Memtest86+ but Live Linux test fails and I can't see why. Menu is reloaded instantly.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

How should I proceed?

Edit 1:
Information about my usb-image.dd.

user@PXE-server:/var/lib/tftpboot/test$ fdisk -l usb-image.dd
Disk usb-image.dd: 3 GiB, 3270508544 bytes, 6387712 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 597F78FB-1090-4C9B-A779-1DC99DDAC259

Laite           Start   Loppu Sektorit  Size Tyyppi
usb-image.dd1    2048  450559   448512  219M EFI System
usb-image.dd2  450560 6371327  5920768  2,8G Microsoft basic data
usb-image.dd3 6371328 6385663    14336    7M Linux filesystem

Edit 2:

I disabled the menu and saw the error message.

Loading /test/usb-image.dd...failed: Bad file number

Best Answer

First of all, ensure memdisk is actually present on your TFTP server and can be served to clients. It's not a magic invocation, memdisk is a separate component of syslinux.

Secondly, loading ISOs in this way usually requires that you pass more parameters to the memdisk kernel, specifically the "iso" and often also the "raw" parameters. Try the following:

KERNEL memdisk
INITRD /test/usb-image.dd
APPEND iso raw

If your image is an isohybrid image (which it presumably is in order to load from a USB stick) and therefore has an MBR, you can probably treat it as a hard disk, as well:

KERNEL memdisk
INITRD /test/usb-image.dd
APPEND harddisk

Thirdly, consider that TFTP is very inefficient and may not necessarily support serving large files (which your image of a Linux LiveUSB certainly is). If the blocksize negotiation is not supported by your TFTP server, it cannot serve anything larger than 32MB - it is possible you are using an implementation, or an old version of an implementation, which does not support this. Consider replacing pxelinux with the lpxelinux variant instead, which supports loading additional resources over HTTP, and serve your kernel/image files from a webserver. It will be considerably faster.

KERNEL http://webserver.mydomain/memdisk
INITRD http://webserver.mydomain/test/usb-image.dd
APPEND harddisk

Extended edit

The following is tested and working.

All you need is the Full FreeDOS ISO, a recent Linux LiveCD, an installed Linux and a Virtual Machine.

Then this is what I did:

Create a virtual machine with a harddisk of only 20 MB size, also attach the Full FreeDOS ISO as a CD-ROM.
Boot the virtual machine from the FreeDOS ISO and install the minimal version of FreeDOS on the virtual harddisk.
Make sure that you partition and format the harddisk with the provided FreeDOS tools during install. The disk should be bootable and formatted as FAT16.
Eject the ISO image and try to boot from the virtual harddisk. Repeat the steps until it successfully boots into the virtual harddisk. For me it only works with 3rd FreeDOS boot option, but you should try all of them.
Attach the Linux LiveCD to the virtual Machine and boot the LiveCD. Then mount the virtual harddisk somewhere in the filesystem.
Transfer the needed DOS tools onto the mounted harddisk. Either via HTTP, SCP, FTP, SMB or even via a real USB flashdrive. It is not necessary but recommended to create a subfolder of the virtual harddisk and put the files in it. You should have extracted the files externally or within the Linux LiveCD system. Make sure that you do not overwrite any FreeDOS files on the harddisk.
Unmount the virtual harddisk.
Create a disk image of the virtual harddisk with dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/freedos.img (replace /dev/sda with the correct device name of the virtual harddisk)
Transfer the image /tmp/freedos.img to a real machine (SCP, SMB, FTP or whatever).
Shutdown the Linux LiveCD system, eject the LiveCD image, reboot and try to boot back into the FreeDOS harddisk (not the image).
If it works and you see the copied programs everything is fine and you can shutdown the system again. If not, repeat from step 5).
If you have an installed Linux somewhere, then try to install the syslinux package. This is easier then compiling your own binaries or download precompiled images from somewhere.
After the install locate the memdisk binary in the filesystem. Mine was at /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk.
Transfer memdisk and freedos.img to the tftp server of your PXE environment and configure it with the following configuration entry.

label freedos
menu label FreeDOS flash environment 
kernel memdisk
append initrd=freedos.img harddisk

Boot via PXE and enjoy FreeDOS from network.

As an exercise for the reader you should try iPXE which is an Open Source PXE firmware. With it you can skip all the tftp/PXE crap and instead boot via HTTP! In this case you can boot from the iPXE boot loader and enter the following commands:

dhcp
imgfetch http://192.168.1.1/freedos.img
chain http://192.168.1.1/memdisk harddisk

dhcp gives you any IP from your DHCP server just to communicate with 192.168.1.1 or whatever your (internal) webserver is. You could also set a static IP instead. The other commands download and install the bootloader and the disk image from HTTP and then boot the image. Impressive.

Centos – PXE Boot FreeBSD ISO from a Linux PXE server

So, /tftpboot/images/freebsd_isos/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso exists correct?

LABEL FreeBSD 9.0 NO KS eth0
        MENU LABEL FreeBSD9.0 AMD64
        LINUX /memdisk
        APPEND iso
        INITRD /tftpboot/images/freebsd_isos/FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso

This should work. It's of the format of what I have used.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Creating a bootable PXE image from a dos utility firmware updater

Extended edit

Centos – PXE Boot FreeBSD ISO from a Linux PXE server

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