Grub Manual

[Les Mikesell]

Jonathan Dieter wrote:

>> All this talk about grub reminds me of something I wanted to do a few 
>> years ago and never quite succeeded, so maybe someone else will know how.
>>
>> I'd like to have a locally installed system, but have one of the boot 
>> choices be to network-boot into an LTSP thin-client. I don't want to 
>> just PXE boot because I want the default after a timeout to be a local 
>> OS.  I thought some versions of grub used to be able to do the 
>> equivalent of an etherboot internally, but that may be gone now.  If I 
>> have a stand-alone bootable floppy or CD that will network-boot the way 
>> I want, is there a way to copy that to the hard drive and make a grub 
>> menu choice that will load it?
> 
> This isn't quite the way that you're describing, but I've set all of the
> computers in our school to boot from PXE, and the default option in the
> pxelinux.cfg/default is to boot from the local hard drive.  Whenever I
> want to re-image the computers, I just change the default option and
> send WOL to the computers.

I want to give the option to the computer user, not have to change it on 
the dhcp server.  A PXE-booted grub menu would be great if one of the 
choices could be to boot locally and another could be to network boot as 
a thin client.  Even better if another non-default choice could be to 
boot into a network install.

> The other thing you might try would be to use Rom-o-matic to generate an
> etherboot floppy image for your network card and write it to a small
> (~1MB) partition on your hard drive.  Then, in Grub do the whole
> rootnoverify(hd0,x), chainloader +1 and see how that works.  I haven't
> actually tried this method, but it seems that it should work.

Going this route, I'd rather not have to dedicate a partition.  Is there 
any way to put it in /boot along with a linux boot setup?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com