booting iso's?

[thatrandomaustralian]

Hi everybody,

I’m sorry if this is already answered but I can’t seem to get the search function to work… After spending days trying to work out why my changes to the file structure arent doing anything to the boot menu, I’ve worked out the guide I was following was for an older version of FOG Project.

I’ve been trying to configure FOG too allow me to boot iso’s over the network. I’m hoping to be able to boot anything I want over the network to forget having to worry about USB sticks and whats on them. This being any distribution of Linux or version Windows.

Is this possible?

Thanks

[george1421]

Realize I have to be “that guy” here. Your request is outside of the scope of FOG imaging. It is not specifically supported by the developers of FOG.

With that said, FOG is flexible enough to allow you to do this. Here is an outline and structure of what is needed: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

Understand that FOG iPXE is only used to deliver the boot kernel to the target computer. The boot kernel has to be aware to support network booting. If the boot kernel expects to find a local CDROM then booting will fail over the network.

Maybe include what you are trying to network boot and we can tell you if its possible.

[thatrandomaustralian]

I wanted to have a menu with centos7, fedora workstation live cd, fedora server, and I was hoping to have windows 7, 10, 2012r2 and 2016.

Centos has PXE boot files so I’d assume fedora does as well, but I’m guessing the windows distros won’t.

There appear to be other options to do this, I just though FOG was a nice clean interface to try to do it with.

[george1421]

@thatrandomaustralian Don’t get me wrong you can do what you ask with FOG, its just not officially supported by the developers.

The link I posted shows you the framework you need to setup to make this work. I didn’t go into the live image boot, but as long as your image supports netbooting then you are golden.

As for the windows group, you MUST use a winpe environment, which you CAN pxe boot. Once WinPE is up, then you will connect to a network share (can be a fog server if you want, or windows) where you have the network images located, then you can run setup.exe from there. Look at how the Win7 section is on that link I provided. You will have to use the same concept for all of the Win images you mentioned. You can not just transfer the ISO image to the target computer and get it to boot. That simply will not work for windows.

[Wayne Workman]

If you look back in the threads here, theres posts of boot menus that contain 50 items in them.

[thatrandomaustralian]

looking through your guides, the windows 10 one seems incomplete as there are no parameters for what to put into the webui

[thatrandomaustralian]

@wayne-workman i assumed there was but when i try to use the forums search engine i just get a blank google page

[Sebastian Roth]

@thatrandomaustralian said in booting iso’s?:

i assumed there was but when i try to use the forums search engine i just get a blank google page

Forum search is working great for me. Though if you can’t use it try google foo. Open normal google.com.au or whatever and search for site:fogproject.org whatever you wand to search for
This way you should get all the results from our forums and the wiki.

[george1421]

@thatrandomaustralian said in booting iso’s?:

looking through your guides, the windows 10 one seems incomplete as there are no parameters for what to put into the webui

I didn’t come right out and say it, but indirectly I said you MUST follow the window 7 instructions for all windows platforms. You MUST run setup.exe from a network share under a winpe environment. I did have win10 recovery booting directly from FOG, but it did not have access to the wim files to install from.

[thatrandomaustralian]

@george1421 ah, yes I see it does say that in the Windows 7 guide… i didn’t look at it as i was trying windows 10 first. many thanks