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[PXE] is a network-boot protocol. It stands for Pre-boot eXecution Environment. It is esentially the same as Etherboot.
Most modern adapters support PXE now, although they generally still need to have the PXE BIOS enabled for this to work.

Some NICs (chipsets actually) that support [PXE] Booting:
* Realtek 8139
* Intel Pro 100 family
* Lots of 3Com cards

If you have a PXE bootable card, and a compliant motherboard BIOS, it will boot off PXE just fine. You can see it trying to do this as the machine boots - it might prompt to boot off the NIC, or it might say something about DHCP, or so on.

If for some reason your machine wont boot via PXE (I found in my dual ppro motherboard that if I had a disk enabled it wouldn't let me boot off the NIC - I had to disable the drive. As I was trying to use PXE to bootstrap a network install, that didn't help me much), you can perhaps use Microsofts Remote Install Services disk. This is a bootdisk which has the bootcode for PXE for a range of disks on it. More information is [here|http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/proddocs/server/sag_RIS_Boot_Floppy.asp]

Here is an (untested) image of a PXE-on-disk bootdisk. http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/PXE/pxebootdisk.img.
 dd if=./pxebootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0
will write it to a floppy disk for you

The next step, of course, is to making your PXE booting machine do something... PXELinu], which is part of SysLinux, will help you out here. PXES, mentioned on the DisklessWorkstationNotes page also makes use of PXE

10 pages link to PXE:

Version 6, saved on Monday, January 12, 2004 6:03:36 am by AristotlePagaltzis

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