The iPXE open source boot firmware project provides an CD image that boots the iPXE binary using isolinux.
Over on the Fediverse, the topic of bootstraping a system from a floppy disk came up, and with the iPXE binary being a mere 330KB, there's really no reason why it shouldn't be possible to boot that from a floppy disk. And it actually does work, with a few simple steps (on a Debian-ish Linux):
That's all! Take your floppy and boot a system
Once iPXE has been started, hit Ctrl-B to call the shell. If you have a DHCP server on your network and a web server with a bootable ISO image, it's just two iPXE commands:
Over on the Fediverse, the topic of bootstraping a system from a floppy disk came up, and with the iPXE binary being a mere 330KB, there's really no reason why it shouldn't be possible to boot that from a floppy disk. And it actually does work, with a few simple steps (on a Debian-ish Linux):
- format floppy disk and create FAT filesystem
fdformat /dev/fd0 mkfs -t fat /dev/fd0
- get syslinux and install to floppy
apt install syslinux syslinux-utils syslinux --install /dev/fd0
- get iPXE ISO
curl -O http://boot.ipxe.org/ipxe.iso
- mount both iPXE ISO and floppy, copy over required files, rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg
mkdir fd iso mount /dev/fd0 fd mount -o ro ipxe.iso iso cp iso/ipxe.krn fd/ cp iso/boot.cat fd/ cp iso/isolinux.cfg fd/syslinux.cfg umount fd umount iso rmdir fd iso
That's all! Take your floppy and boot a system
Once iPXE has been started, hit Ctrl-B to call the shell. If you have a DHCP server on your network and a web server with a bootable ISO image, it's just two iPXE commands:
dhcp sanboot http://<webserver>/<filename>.iso
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