[BBLISA] MBR that reboots machine

[Bob Webber]

I agree with DSR that USB sticks are at least enough better than what you’re doing now to be worth the effort.

However, if you really want to use a custom MBR, there’s a list of some relatively well-known bootloaders on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders) that includes a column noting whether or not that particular bootloader will fit in an MBR.

Also, the page of linkage from the “mbldr” (which seems to be FOSS) has references to related projects and relevant BIOS/MBR details.

Good luck!


> On Oct 7, 2016, at 10:55 AM, Alex Aminoff <alex at basespace.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> We need a MBR that reboots the machine. Surely this must exist?
> 
> Our systems boot from the network. If, after a power outage say, that does not work, the BIOS goes on to boot from the local HD. Since the local HD has no OS on it, the boot sequence endsand the machine sits forever waiting for manual intervention.
> 
> If the local HD had a MBR that caused the boot process to start over again, then our machines would retry network booting forever, until the network boot servers (and all switches along the path to them) were up again.
> 
> I have googled extensively for this, I have found assembly source code for the standard Windows MBR, and I think I have seen explanations on how to get a machine to reboot in assembly, so I may attempt to compile my own bit of code, but it seems likely that someone else has done this before.
> 
> Thanks,
> - Alex
> 
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