document updated 13 years ago, on Sep 20, 2010
There are numerous ways to try to boot things off of a laptop. Our main goal is to start the Ubuntu installer, but being able to PXE boot our network suite is really really useful as well.
gPXE CD
The ROM-O-Matic will generate a 1) .iso, with 2) "all-drivers". It should let any laptop with a working CDROM boot to PXE.
Note: if you wish, you can make your CD have a boot-menu that can boot other things too
USB mass storage
If the BIOS is new enough, it should be able to boot off of a USB flash drive or HDD. Unfortunately, most of our laptops are much too old for this.
(note: BIOS support usually isn't strictly necessary, since there exist CD bootstrapping programs which will chainload a USB booter. However, if the CD drive was functional on a laptop, we would have used lower-tech methods already. So this option is basically never useful to us for booting the installer)
TODO: Try this procedure to create a bootable USB drive.
configure HDD to boot gPXE
It should be possible to pull the HDD, plug it into another computer using one of those super nifty USB adapters, configure it to boot into gPXE straight away, and then plug that HDD back into the laptop.
TODO: Get the following to boot from GRUB2:
PCMCIA
PCMCIA flash memory cards (either cards with flash built-in, or CompactFlash adapters) can sometimes be booted. However, this does require BIOS support.
Though it does seem to be an area that's actively used by some people[1][2], so it may be worth looking into.
TODO: try this out on a newer laptop
TODO: after I confirm I know how to do it on a newer laptop, see if the same procedure works on one of our older laptops
other Option ROMs
Many (most?) BIOS's support the ability to run some initializing code that's built into VGA cards, NIC cards, etc etc. This is known as option ROM.
TODO: Are there any PCMCIA- or MiniPCI-based network adapters which natively support PXE booting? If so, buy one, and try it out.
TODO: Are there any other ways that an Option ROM can be used?