HowTo Guides

This page contains guides to performing a variety of network booting tasks. You'll need to download and build gPXE before trying most of them.

There are three typical deployment scenarios for gPXE.

• If you are a new user of gPXE, the quickest way to get started is to try putting gPXE onto a removable medium, such as:
  • bootable floppy disk
  • bootable CD-ROM
  • bootable USB key

• Network card manufacturers, OEMs, and seasoned users may be interested in:
  • burning a gPXE ROM into a network card
  • adding gPXE to the BIOS (Useful for on-board NICs)

• Users with existing large PXE deployments may want to try:
  • chainloading gPXE from an existing PXE ROM.

• Users with existing IBM/Novell RPL deployments may want to try:
  • chainloading gPXE from IBM/Novell RPL.

gPXE can boot from a web server just as easily as from a TFTP server. Web servers typically scale better than TFTP servers, and don't suffer from the file size limitations and other problems that plague TFTP booting.

• HTTP boot

Boot from SAN is the process of booting from a remote disk, using a protocol such as iSCSI or AoE. It can be used to boot operating systems that do not generally support network booting, such as Windows Server 2003, Windows XP or Windows Vista.

• Boot from SAN

Windows PE is the installer for Vista and later versions of Windows. It can be started from the network using gPXE.

• Booting Windows PE

There are several DHCP options that can be used to control advanced features of gPXE. Instructions are available for

• ISC dhcpd (as shipped with most Linux distributions)

Steps to install the iSCSI Enterprise Target (//http://iscsitarget.sourceforge.net/) on Fedora 8.

• iSCSI Enterprise Target on Fedora 8

Here is a method for speeding up SAN booting and reducing disk space usage.

• Setting up Cow Devices

• Making a bootable DOS USB flash drive