PXE booting Centos 6.8 live cd

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lamune
Posts: 7
Joined: 2006/11/29 02:32:45

PXE booting Centos 6.8 live cd

Post by lamune » 2016/06/04 00:15:44

Hi all, I've looked through the forums and tried various things, but I have not been successful in being able to PXE boot the CentOS 6.8 live CD image.

I've tried a few different things, like treating the iso image as a memdisk, all to no avail. I can sometimes get the thing to sort of half-boot and then kernel panic on me.

Here's what I'm attempting right now. The problem is that there is no /dev/ram0 device. I see that it's pulling down the initrd but I can't seem to get dracut to pivot on the proper device to boot. Where is the initrd going?

LABEL CentOS 6.8 LiveCD
MENU LABEL CentOS 6.8 Live CD
KERNEL linux/centos-6.8/live/isolinux/vmlinuz0 rdshell
APPEND initrd=linux/centos-6.8/live/isolinux/initrd0.img boot=live fetch=tftp://192.168.1.1/linux/centos-6.8/live/LiveOS/squashfs.img root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=10000000 ip=dhcp

lamune
Posts: 7
Joined: 2006/11/29 02:32:45

Re: PXE booting Centos 6.8 live cd

Post by lamune » 2016/06/04 06:05:15

Looks like I forgot a step, so I'll answer my own question in case someone needs to do the same.

You need to install the livecd-tools package and use the tool livecd-iso-to-pxeboot to create the vmlinuz0 and initrd0.img files, and it will create the proper pxelinux config that you can modify to point to the proper locations once you move them vmlinuz0 and initrd0.img files to where your tftp daemon serves them from.

arthar360
Posts: 1
Joined: 2017/05/14 05:03:50

Re: PXE booting Centos 6.8 live cd

Post by arthar360 » 2017/05/19 09:23:39

After using the livecd-iso-to-pxeboot initrd0.img, It the pxe boot gives error "initrd too large to handle, disabling initrd".

the default ( as generated by livecd-iso-to pxeboot) file is
LABEL pxeboot
MENU LABEL CentOS Live
KERNEL /vmlinuz0
initrd /initrd0.img
APPEND rootflags=loop root=live:/CentOS-6.8-x86_64-LiveCD.iso rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet nodiskmount nolvmmount rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 rd.live.check
ONERROR LOCALBOOT 0

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TrevorH
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Joined: 2009/09/24 10:40:56
Location: Brighton, UK

Re: PXE booting Centos 6.8 live cd

Post by TrevorH » 2017/05/20 10:57:54

There are already PXE boot images on the CD/DVD that you should use. Look in the images/pxeboot/ directory on the iso image and copy those files to your tftp server.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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