Documentation for Etherboot

• Introduction: A typical network boot scenario, including explanations for new users

• Troubleshooting FAQ
• EtherBoot image types explanation

• How to specify which boot file to load

• Burning ROM chips
  • More specific: for Realtek 8139 NICs
• Putting EtherBoot into your BIOS

• Using LILO with EtherBoot
• PXELINUX

• Using EtherBoot as a PXE boot rom
• Using EtherBoot as a PXE 2nd-stage-loader

• How to use EtherBoot in a VMware virtual machine
• How to use EtherBoot as ROM in the VMware BIOS / EtherBoot ROM in VMware and Bochs network cards
• How to use EtherBoot with Bochs
• How to use gPXE with QEMU

• Booting Memdisk
  • Diskless MS-DOS (and compatibles)
  • Diskless Windows 98

• Loading EtherBoot from a Windows 2000/XP NT loader
• Using EtherBoot with Microsofts Remote Installation Services (RIS)

• Booting FreeBSD

• ATA-over-Ethernet (experimental)
• Having more than one DHCP-server on a network
• Multicast protocol support (slam/tftp-multicast)
• Experimental SafeBootMode cryptographic boot image check

Network Bootable Image format (NBI) is a legacy format that wraps operating system images (such as Linux kernels) in a wrapper, which makes it possible for Etherboot to load the images directly. The “mknbi” (make NBI) utility performs tje wrapping operation.

Note: This is not needed for PXE and PXELINUX booting, and is not recommended for new users. For new users, we recommend using PXELINUX

For those who need to use the NBI format, please see:

• mknbi utility description and manpage

• A somewhat dated Etherboot Developers' manual (does not cover recent versions of Etherboot, or gPXE)
• A Developer To-Do List

• gPXE Network Driver API
• GDB remote debugging