[ipxe-devel] [Etherboot-discuss] drop to a boot prompt

[Michael Brown]

On Monday 21 Mar 2011 01:37:22 Dan R wrote:
> I just stared to play around with gpxe and so far its been really fun
> to play with but there is one thing that I haven't been able to find
> an answer to and I wan't to see if you could help me out. What am
> trying to do is when gpxe loads to have it drop to a boot prompt where
> I can just type the image name that I want to boot like it does with
> pxelinux, the problem is every thing I see uses menu.c32 or
> vesamenu.c32 and am not a big fan of a menu system.

(Redirecting to ipxe-devel mailing list; gPXE development has stopped.)

You can cause iPXE to drop to a command line (http://ipxe.org/cmdline) by 
pressing Ctrl-B when iPXE starts up.  If you want to eliminate the need for 
the keypress, and always go straight to the command line, then you can use an 
embedded script (see http://ipxe.org/scripting#embedded_scripts) which 
contains just:

  #!ipxe
  shell

It's probably more useful to have your embedded script also initialise the 
network adapter via DHCP, so you might want your embedded script to contain 
something like:

  #!ipxe
  dhcp || echo Warning: failed to configure network
  shell

Once you're at the command line, you can use the "chain" command 
(http://ipxe.org/cmd/chain) to download and boot whatever you want.  For 
example:

  iPXE> chain http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/boot.php

Hope that helps,

Michael