Netboot live install fails to boot

Question

Hi,
I'm having massive amounts of trouble trying to get a netboot live install to work. The target has GRUB legacy on its HDD. Following https://releng.archlinux.org/pxeboot/ ,
I copied ipxe.lkrn to /boot/, added a section to menu.lst.
Reboot, select that new option; it loads correctly ipxe and I get to the graphical menu ( like http://jadelinux.com/images/archimg/1.png ). I select Release64, then any mirror (tried 3), and then I see vmlinuz and archiso.img getting downloaded correctly (I presume), then
Booting the kernel.
:: running hook [xyz]
... (more hooks)
:: running hook [archiso_pxe_common]
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 00:14..... mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
And then nothing.
Fun facts :
- from either the graphical or text menu, pressing [tab] to try adding kernel options doesn't work, i.e. I can't edit the command before booting ! Swapping keyboards doesn't help
- from either graph or text menu, pressing Esc gets me to a "boot: " prompt, but I can't enter kernel options from there !
- from another computer running wireshark, connected to the same hub, the last traffic I see is some (unanswered ?) DHCP requests from the machine stuck at "IP-Config ..." So I thought maybe my router doesn't like these repeat / redundant dhcp query... I tried manually releasing the IP just before that "IP-Config : eth0 ...." line. The only difference I see is that the DHCP query now succeeds ( I see the new assigned IP in the router's table), but the netboot process still doesn't continue !
Any ideas ?

Answer 1

If you haven't put too much work into your install yet, I would just reinstall. You can also boot into a live cd, chroot, and reinstall the kernel (pacman -S kernel26).