Booting from TFTP'd floppy image?

[Geir Ove Myhr]

Is it possible, or will it be possible in a future version,
to boot a floppy image acquired from a TFTP server?

In our department, we use GRUB to boot Windows 2000 and
FreeBSD 4.5 on our computers. In addition to these, I would
like to have a menu item called "Reinstall". This would
download a floppy image from a TFTP-server and boot it. The
floppy image would be a DOS-image containing an autoexec.bat
which started the Norton Ghost client.

As far as I can see it is not (yet) possible to boot a
floppy image this way using GRUB. It is possible using PXE,
but that would mean running around turning the netboot
feature on in the BIOS every time we were going to
reinstall, and then turning it off afterwards to avoid
net-booting the reinstall image instead of FreeBSD or
Windows.

The same issue was brought up by Dr A V Le Blanc in a mail
to bug-grub 14 Sep 2000, and according to the answers it
shouldn't be too difficult to add a 'nbi' (Network Boot
Image) command to grub to chainload the bootstrap code.

Is this already implemented? If not, will it be in the
future?

 -- Geir Ove Myhr