Syslinux - Nov 2003 - Local boot problem

Hello,

I'm going to prepare a multiboot computer laboratory for  students.
I need to have a central server to order which system should be booted 
(systems are on local hd).

I hope it can be done with pxelinux, but I met a problem during tests.
At this moment I have one system (linux) on a disk an lilo in MBR.
PXE booting from network looks fine, but I can't boot locally:

<copying form screen>

Booting from local disk...

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.
Boot Failure from Previous Device..

Boot Failure
Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device
<----->

Secondly,
because I could not boot I've not tested myself whether it is possible 
to send from pxelinux request to lilo which  system should be booted. Is 
it possible? Using 'append' ?

And at the end. There should be nice screens and menus ... ;) I know the 
answer: comboot(32), but I'm rather unfamiliar with such low-level, 
dos-like, hacker programming  :)
So, are you planning any how-to, higher level libraries or any other 
support?

best regards
p.o.

Pawel Oleksik wrote:
> 
> And at the end. There should be nice screens and menus ... ;) I know the 
> answer: comboot(32), but I'm rather unfamiliar with such low-level, 
> dos-like, hacker programming  :)
> So, are you planning any how-to, higher level libraries or any other 
> support?
> 
Planning to, yes... I have been working on porting newlib to com32... 
unfortunately I haven't had time to finish that project yet.

	-hpa

OK, I found the reason. I've set in BIOS that the only device to boot 
from was NIC.

Unfortunately, LOCALBOOT backs exactly to BIOS and it is not possible to 
make it to boot from
other specified device, i.e. hda1.
So, there is one question that is important to me. In what way I could 
boot from any pointed partition?

best regards
p.o.