Advanced Menu - Archlinux and Windows
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Hey everyone!
I’ve been using Fog at my work for a few weeks now and I love it so far. It’s way more convenient than ghost! Recently I’ve been making use of the advanced menu in order to install CentOS on machines, and that’s been great too. So much so, it made me wonder about installing Windows from the Fog server. So I took my install disk’s iso image and set it to boot with “initrd /path/to/my/Win7.iso”, followed by chain memdisk iso raw ||. I assume this loads the entire iso into a RAM disk and then my computer attempts to boot from this RAM disk. Is this correct? I have a machine with 8GB of memory, more than enough to support a 4GB disk. I booted to Fog, selected my image, and after downloading, the image returns an error saying something about memdisk ending with a fractional cylinder, and that the image might be truncated. It then refuses to boot. Does anyone know what might be causing this? I checked my iso against it’s checksum and it should be fine. My Arch Linux install behaves similarly when booted to in this manner. It won’t fail immediately like Windows, it loads the GUI boot menu and when it fails to mount a disk it reverts to a fallback prompt.
Lastly I was wondering about Arch Linux as an advanced menu option. Arch provides iso files as well as it’s own iPXE environment. Is there any way I can boot to the latter out of Fog? When I added CentOS to the menu, I actually picked apart the iso and pulled out the kernel image as well as the initrd. Is this how I should be going about Arch as well?
Thanks! Sorry about the wall of text!
Edit: And sorry this is in the wrong subforum!
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I was able to solve my issues with Archlinux. Arch has a special iso image called archboot which is used for PXE installs. I downloaded the archboot initramfs.img and vmlinuz files and set them up in the advanced menu. The system boots them perfectly!
Now I just need to figure out why my computer won’t load my Win 7 install ISO into RAM. I know, I know, I should just make a universal image with sysprep, but the install disk will be for those rare cases where you absolutely need to start from scratch.
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this should help you with the windows install disk [url]http://ipxe.org/howto/winpe?s[]=winpe[/url]