hi everyone.
i have a small tftp/pxe server i use to install different OS's without
having to burn countless cd's (not all the machines i work on support
usb boot). until recently, these were mostly linux/bsd-based systems
(plus freedos).
recently i've been trying to deploy a network-based windows
installation, by booting windows pe (3.1, the one based on win7) with
memdisk and from there accessing the windows xp/7 iso from a samba
share, mounting it and running the setup. now, winpe boots and runs
smoothly without the slightest problem; however, i kinda miss the
possibility of getting the command line, as in the old cat
/proc/cmdline.
i'd like to do this so that i could have multiple setup options
directly in the pxe menu, without the need to make a different iso for
every option. i.e. i'd keep only a 32bit and a 64bit iso, place
different parameters in memdisk's command line, then have winpe's
autoexec.bat sort out everything. for example, from the 32 bit image i
could install both windows xp and windows 7, and so on.
on the syslinux wiki, and elsewhere, i found getargs and mdiskchk.
problem: they use interrupts. even recompiling them in 32 bit,
windows' protected mode won't allow the program to execute int 13h.
so, no command line.
another possibility would be to append a tiny floppy image with a txt
file inside which would be parsed by autoexec.bat; this way i'd only
need a different image for every option, much better than a 150+ mb
iso. i know that this approach (having multiple images as multiple
virtual drives) was possible in grub4dos, on which alas my knowledge
base is zero, as i never used it (and i don't even know if i can use
it via pxe). from all the documentation i'm pretty sure it's not
possible in memdisk, but i read somewhere of a memdisk.c32 in
development by shao miller which would allow something similar, as far
as i understood (which could actually be quite little). have there
been news about the project, was it scrapped or is it still ongoing?
thanks for the attention. : )
Alex
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