I am trying to rescue an old laptop with no working cdrom and no usb-boot-support by setting up a tftp server to boot Linux Mint 20 from a Raspberry Pi running archlinux arm.

What i have so far:

• A dhcp-server through NetworkManagers dnsmasq-feature.
• A directory /srv/tftp owned by user/group 'dnsmasq' and 644-Privileges
• A copy of https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/...ux-6.03.tar.gz from wich i extracted pxelinux.0 to /srv/tftp
• A linuxmint-20-xfce-64Bit.iso mounted on /srv/tftp/image
• A dropin-file for dnsmasq '30-tftp.conf'
  
  Code:

  enable-tftp
  tftp-root=/srv/tftp
  tftp-boot=/srv/tftp/pxelinux.0

• 
  and a file /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default that contains:
  
  Code:

  MENU LABEL mint
  LINUX image/casper/vmlinuz
  INITRD image/casper/initrd.lz
  APPEND file=mint/preseed/linuxmint.seed boot=casper acpi=off fetch=tftp://10.0.0.1/image/casper/filesystem.squashfs quiet splash --

So far i get a DHCP Lease and a Timeout when trying to boot (The Boot-Screen says "PXE-E32: TFTP open timeout")
I mostly followed thisToturial allthough i tried to keep it a bit simpler regarding the boot-menu and its features. I feel like i am not totally wrong with the steps above but something is missing for sure. Can someobe please give an opinion?

Maybe these will help...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/document...et_tutorial.md

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-confi...xe-boot-server

https://docs.j7k6.org/raspberry-pi-pxe-server/

1 members found this post helpful.

Guide.

You have this.

Not sure if that is the whole thing but it would be a good start.

Thanks for the hints. I have gotten somewhat further into the matter and was able to boot into a menu. Still being unable to load the kernel files from the server i suppose it is because i forgot to mount the image-file with -o uid/gid=981 (dnsmasq). Anyhow, i might soon be able to ask more specific questions than the entry post.
Thats good advice, thanks.
Right now the first problem after an update is that i cannot mount iso-files at all anymore (unknown filesystem type 'iso9660') so i'll have to make myself familiar with kernel modules or try a different approach.

I think i'm making progress. After extracting vmlinuz, initrd.lz, filesystem.squashfs and custom.seed the files are being loaded from the server via pxe-boot.

Unfortunately i get a Kernelpanic (CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: init Not tainted 4.15.0-60-generic #67-Ubuntu) and i don't know yet wether this is due to incompatible architecture/hardware or my tftp-setup (i know very little about the boot process). If it's the first this thread could be marked as solved.

Update: i could boot the laptop with the alpinelinux-netboot-files on the tftp-server pretty easy so this thread is solved.