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Submit to SlashdotFloppy drives are a thing of the past and CD drives seem to be on their way out as well. USB flash drives and higher definition optical disks have replaced them. Today, newer portable data technologies appear faster than ever to satisfy the insatiable cutting edge appetite.
I remember when floppy disks were phasing out in the late 1990s. My friend showed me his new Apple MacBook and how it was so advanced that Apple didn’t even install a floppy disk drive. With the obsoleteness of floppy disks and CDs, how then do we boot our computers nowadays? What if the Windows partition on one of my systems has a freak accident and my partition managing software is on a floppy disk. Well, I could do one of several options.
Like I said in my Wake-on-LAN PHP article, I like to fiddle with the options in the system BIOS. Occasionally, I have to change the boot order to accommodate some of my hacks. I've learned that I can boot a hard disk, an optical disk, a USB flash drive, a floppy disk, a flash card (CompactFlash), and a network adapter. I was already familiar with all of the possibilities except for the last one. The network adapter option always intrigued me. “Boot from my Ethernet card? How novel!”
My curiosity finally got the best off me when I researched PXE this past week. Network adapter booting is an old technology. Integration with the BIOS became common in the late 1990s when Intel released its new specification for BIOS features. One of the mandatory features was PXE. In PXE, the computer can boot an operating system without any non-volatile memory like magnetic or optical media. After the CMOS POST test, the network adapter broadcasts a DHCP request. This request isn’t like any normal IP lease request. This special request appends some extra data at the end of the broadcast for PXE functionality. If a PXE-capable DCHP server does not respond, then the system halts or moves to the next boot order. However, if a PXE-capable DHCP server is listening on the network, it leases an IP address in its pool and it TFTPs the bootstrap (operating system) code. The code is placed in the host memory and is executed.
Unfortunately, PXE works best with Linux, which I’m not very familiar with. I looked for a Windows alternative and I found TFTPD32. It's pretty decent. Usage of the program can be a little tricky though since there's not a lot of documentation. Basically, I followed the instructions on this article and this site. Below is my rough procedure.
TFTPD32 worked very well for me when I tried it. I was able to remotely boot almost any floppy image available. The only one that wasn't successful was the Linux floppy disk; I don't know why. One suggestion to the maker of this software, it would be ultra-cool if there was some sort of way that I could boot an ISO image off the network with PXE. But, I don't if the PXE specification would support that. All in all, I think it was pretty neat. I'll definitely turn to this first for my subsequent "floppy disk" boots. Since it is all electronic based (no magnetic or optical media), the speed surpasses any other boot method. Try it out! As usual, please feel free to leave any comments, questions, or suggestions below.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Hey!!! Cheers from Mexico..
I have do ALL you say here…. and it works 😀
I just want to install an OS over PXE BOOT.. i thired a lot of things.. but none of those linux tutorials or winpe things didn’t work..
I have to use your trick! using boot floppy images to make the lan installation…
I’ve searched for lanboot with floopy, i used the BART’s NetWork Boot Disk (the automake thing) Also used the NTFSDOS (loaded inside the shared folder) .. and.. thadaaaa… i can copy the install over the diskless laptop 😀
So long! great article!! YOU SAVE MY LAP! 😀
January 21st, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Can i Install windowsxp with tftp32? i want to install it on a notebook i have without a dvd and doesnt support usb boot. i dont have winxp serveer too.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
GREAT tutorial! using your tutorial with some minor adjustments, i was able to recover a trueimage backup to a new hd on my diskless tablet pc!!
September 8th, 2008 at 10:21 am
i follow you mentioned above and i can’t able to get memdisk and virtual floppy drive.
how can i boot dos through pxe to winxp machine give some tips to complete as soon as possible thank you a lot.
December 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Hi. Very useful information, thank you very much. Do you know how I can instead of this linux thing or instead of a floppy disk image boot up some version of Windows? XP for instance. How do I obtain\create a Windows XP boot image?
March 5th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I am lost.. do not know how you got it to work, but when i reboot a machine, I was prompt PXE-M0F exiting Intel Boot Agent F1 to retry or F2 to setup. Can you point me where I\’ve done wrong
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:22 pm
your link is Error 404 – Not Found. Download pxelinux.0, menu.c32, and memdisk. Or, just extract files from a syslinux distribution. Place these three files in the PXE folder.
September 24th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
sorry. i corrected it. here it is: http://www.freewarereview.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/combo.zip
October 20th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Hi, I’ve managed to boot my laptop using the tutorial, and started up freedos as it was the only image I had, however I can’t see the HDD on my laptop? any ideas?
Great tutorial by the way….
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:24 am
Try to boot freedos without the pxe (floppy or cd) to see if the pxe is the problem first.
My guess is that your filesystem is NTFS or your HDD is sata (not the older eide/pata). try running fdisk. if you see partitions or a hdd, then your partitions a likely incompatible. if you don’t see partitions or a hdd, you have an incompatible hdd (most likely sata).
good luck!
October 22nd, 2009 at 3:25 am
Thanks for the response. You are right, my partitions are NTFS. I ran fdisk /xo and then I was able to change which of my partitions is the active one, which then lets me boot my old windows install and recover all my data, which was why I started down this PXE network boot in the first place.
Now I’ve got it all working, I shall keep playing…
Many thanks.
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:02 am
[…] Tftpd32 for Windows – Unleash the PXE BIOS Network Boot Feature Within – the freeware review theres a […]
October 14th, 2010 at 7:02 am
[…] en tender, puedes aplicar un traductor., saludos links:Guides about TFTPD32 and PXE LAN booting Tftpd32 for Windows – Unleash the PXE BIOS Network Boot Feature Within – the freeware review […]
November 28th, 2010 at 10:20 am
Hi! I have done everything you said in his tutorial, but when i boot from the target computer it showes me “No Boot filename received”! If you have any solution for my problem please contact me bye e-mail!
Regards,
Aurel
February 19th, 2011 at 12:48 am
i installed everything wat u said me but in tftpd.32 is working properly, nothing is coming in the dhcp server wat i should do can u discripe me more abt this????
August 7th, 2011 at 9:38 pm
Thank you! I know this article is old but it just saved me a ton of trouble after 2 days!
I managed to apply a wrong BIOS update (there were 2 versions for the same laptop) to an Acer Aspire 1800. The update was done in Windows XP. After the reboot the screen was scrambled. Tried various approaches from the Net with no luck.
Since I couldn’t see the screen probably, it was almost impossible to do anything. Even an Acer support person (via online chat) suggested I needed a physcial technician to fix the issue!
I used the above (add some issues with the path settings since I used a newer versio of tftpd32) but I got it to work (jumpstarted the Acer from a Vista laptop with a direct Ethernet cable between the two)
Thanks again!
September 22nd, 2011 at 6:13 am
Hi
I tried but all I get is PXE-T01: File not Found
PXE-E3B: TFTP Error – File not Found
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent
DHCP seems to be assigning an IP address but TFTP – nothing!
Same if I use an external Win2K3 server for DHCP
September 30th, 2011 at 3:56 am
try Serva32 instead…
November 3rd, 2011 at 2:26 am
Nick u point wrong directory
July 11th, 2012 at 10:46 am
you can create the default file with notpad and save as default then edit name to remove the .txt
also in the same directory dup your linux iso extracted and rename isolinux.cfg to default and it will try to boot and get quite far untill it gets to casper\intrid.gz
September 26th, 2012 at 9:02 am
you guys have to check this out…
It PXE installs all MS OSs taking just a 2 MB download; but the best part is that it really works!
read here:
http://www.vercot.com/~serva/howto/WindowsPXE1.html
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