[Infrastructures] Installation using PXEboot but not booting system with DHCP

[Michael T. Halligan]

David,

What I do is keep Hard Disk/Scsi as #1, PXE as number two. When I want 
to reboot and force a pxeboot, I'll delete the MBR
as so :

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda (or whatever your MBR location is), bs=1024 
count=1

Now say you're using Linux, and redhat to do a Kickstart, or SuSE with 
AutoYAST. A nice thing you could do
is install from the beginning with a second kernel that does a 
kickstart/autoyast/place your favorite installation system here as a 
boot option.. Then
you could have a script that changes the kernel boot order, and runs 
that installation on boot when you want to re-install.

Michael



David A. Ulevitch wrote:

> Infrastructure Folks,
>
> Here's a question I've had for a while that I was reminded of by the  
> DHCP question posed to the list.
>
> I PXEBoot for installation but then I want to boot from the hard disk  
> afterwards.
>
> In a BIOS I can set a boot order of "1: Hard Disk, 2: PXE" but that  
> only works when the hard disk is empty and has no MBR setup.  As soon  
> as installation completes and it reboots, the PXEboot process starts  
> up all over again.
>
> I have a system that modifies the dhcpd.conf to take a mac address  
> out of the PXEboot group but that seems like a pain and perhaps the  
> wrong way about it.
>
> How do people install with PXEboot but then boot off the hard drive  
> in subsequent reboots.  Different network?  Special BIOS tricks?
>
> A related question, how do you then PXEboot in the future if you want  
> to reinstall a box that has an already working disk (but a programmer  
> hosed, for example)?
>
> Hopefully this is on-topic for this list.  I know it's certainly a  
> topic list members have experience with...
>
> Thanks,
> David Ulevitch
>
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