This weekend I had to do some firmware upgrades on a very old HP Proliant DL140 G2 server we had at work. For those of you who don’t know this machine, it is a Pizza box style (only 1U height) server with an Intel Xeon 2.8Ghz CPU, 6 Gigs of RAM and 2 160Gb SATA drives.
This server has been our antivirus server for some years now and I was required to upgrade the firmware to cope with some incompatibilities.
The big problem is that this server is that it has no floppy drive nor CDROM!
Since HP’s firmware update files are installed from bootable floppy disks, I had a big problem. Fortunately for me, I came across the article from mataporkoz.com that shows how to setup a PXE boot server.
Using the article as a departing point, I setup on a linux server the TFTP service and copied the pxelinux.0 to the /tftpboot directory.

 cp /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot

 After configuring the dhcp service, and setting up the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file, I was able to boot the server using the internal NIC with PXE.
Then I found that the syslinux package has a file called memdisk that allows you to load disk images directly into RAM.
 #cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /tftpboot
 I got the files from HP that generated two bootable floppies with the firmware updates.

 Then I created two floppy disk images of the floppies with the command:
#dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tftpboot/bootdisk1.img
#dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tftpboot/bootdisk2.img

 I edited the /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file and added the following lines:

timeout 300
label bootdisk1
kernel=memdisk
append initrd=bootdisk1.img
label bootdisk2
kernel=memdisk
append initrd=bootdisk2.img


And voilà! when I pressed F12 to boot my DL140 Server from the network, I was presented with the PXE boot screen.

boot: bootdisk1

And the HP firmware upgrade utility loaded like a charm!

This really saved me a lot of time, since I had no external floppy disk at hand and dismantling the server to put a temporary drive inside was out of the question.
You can use the same technique to build a bootable USB drive with multiple floppy disk images, but I will let you google for it ;)

Hope this is helpful,