PXE FreeBSD 6.2 Install

So I have a brain-dead HP DL145 that doesn't like booting from USB CD-ROM's (no built in SATA either) with FreeBSD (OpenBSD 4.1 was fine, BTW)

Fortunately this blog showed how to use memdisk and pxelinux to get the job done.

In short, you convert the /boot directory from the network install image and pass that to memdisk:

# cat /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default 
label linux
        kernel bzimage
        append initrd=initrd

label freebsd
        kernel memdisk
        append initrd=boot.hd harddisk

The only thing that tripped me up is that memdisk is a binary that must be copied over to your /tftpboot partition

# pwd
/tftpboot
# ls -al
total 84720
drwxr-xr-x   3 root  wheel       512 Apr 13 04:17 .
drwxr-xr-x  16 root  wheel       512 Apr 12 10:34 ..
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  33554432 Apr 13 03:31 boot.hd
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   3542048 Apr 12 04:18 bzimage
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel   5919658 Apr 12 04:18 initrd
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     19132 Apr 13 03:48 memdisk
-r-xr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    215040 Apr 12 10:26 pxeboot
-rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel     13204 Apr 12 04:16 pxelinux.0
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel       512 Apr 12 04:30 pxelinux.cfg