HowTo Guides

This page contains guides to performing a variety of network booting tasks. You'll need to download and build gPXE before trying most of them.

There are three typical deployment scenarios for gPXE.

• New users should probably use one of these media for booting, as this is the quickest way to get started with gPXE:
  • bootable floppy disk
  • bootable CD-ROM
  • bootable USB key

• Network card manufacturers, OEMs, and seasoned users probably want to use one of these methods:
  • burning or flashing gPXE into a network card
  • adding gPXE to the BIOS

• Users with existing large PXE deployments may want to use:
  • chainloading gPXE from an existing PXE ROM.

gPXE can boot from a web server just as easily as from a TFTP server. Web servers typically scale better than TFTP servers, and don't suffer from the file size limitations and other problems that plague TFTP booting.

• HTTP boot

Boot from SAN is the process of booting from a remote disk, using a protocol such as iSCSI or AoE. It can be used to boot operating systems that do not generally support network booting, such as Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP.

• Boot from SAN