I currently work in a technology help desk for my college, where we fix the personal computers of all the students. We have hundreds of DVD's and CD's that we use to boot into all kinds of different things to troubleshoot. Among them are:
- Various Linux distros
- Windows PE environments
- hard drive Regen
- Windows recovery consoles (all versions)
- Windows installation disks (all versions)
This means that we spend a ton of money on CD's and DVD's as they get lost, scratched, etc. It is becoming quite a hassle to manage them! I have been considering toying with a PXE server that could allow us to boot to these things over the network and reduce the clutter.
Some of these disks have special boot information such that you can't simply copy the files to a blank disc. And some of them are incompatible with each other on multi-boot CD's I've made. For example, I haven't been able to make a multi-boot CD with Ubuntu 11.04 and Hiren's boot CD.
- Is it possible to have one PXE server that can allow devices to "boot to" many different environments?
- Is it possible for the PXE server to have bootable disk images (ISO's) that it simply 'emulates' for the connected computers to boot to?
- If the answer to #2 is 'no', how can one set up a PXE server to boot to multiple things?
Ultimately, I would like to boot to a PXE server that just gives a numbered menu of items that we can boot to. Like 1) Ubuntu, 2) hard drive Regen, 3) Windows 7 Home, etc. Is this possible?
Where can I start?
No comments:
Post a Comment