BIOS : Booting From LAN

[Geforce]

Can anyone tell me how this works?

The reason for it is that I'm currently taking images of all systems here at work which I'm going to store on a 800gb-Raid1 Volume.

The problem is that, the servers do NOT have Cd-rom drives, nor do they have space for them.

If I could map a cd-drive in dos to another PC on the domain, I could boot from the Symantec Ghost CD-Rom.

So, how does the boot from LAN option in the BIOS work?

[Peter M]

In a nutshell, the current "PXE" standard for boot-through-LAN works like this:

The client BIOS installs a high level infrastructure (the "base code") and an interface chip driver (the "UNDI").
First thing these two do is first fire a DHCP request to get an IP address. Then a bootstrap loader image gets fetched through TFTP - the server must have one ready for each MAC address out there. The bootstrap loader can then either discard the base code and keep the UNDI to continue loading more OS bits through PXE, or discard both and use its own drivers. Using the former way, the bootstrap loader can be kept hardware independent.

You need to set up your boot server to have the services, the images and a list of client MAC addresses.
Recommended read: PXE specification. Google for it - much useful stuff found on the Intel web site.

[Geforce]

Thanks very much