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You tried everything, booting from CD, DVD, USB, and in your desperate attempts you already started to look if there is a floppy drive laying around the house, just to get the damned thing to boot. The very same thing happened to me today. Computer, simply, would not boot. The only thing left to do is booting your computer from the network. Sounds scary, I know, but in reality this can be a trivial thing to acomplish. I have a Linksys WRT54 router that is running DD-WRT and it serves me as a DHCP server. DD-WRT is using dnsmasq which can provides DNS, DHCP and TFTP services! Great news, since this is all that you need for network boot. Unfortunately TFTP server is disabled and not really usable if you don’t have any extra storage where you could put the tftp files. You will have to use an alternative tftp server, in my case Ubuntu Workstation. Continue reading for the whole recipe …
