I need to perform a diskless boot for a system that has a hard drive installed. The reason for booting diskless is so I can repartition and reformat the drive without any restrictions.
This system has a network card and I have successfully setup a ubuntu 9.10 machine as a netboot server. The client system is able to obtain the original kernel, but I had to replace it because my system doesn't have an FPU. I replaced the original initrd.gz with a ramdisk.gz (renamed to initrd.gz) that works if I boot it from a USB stick.
However, there is a problem which I don't understand. The system ends up booting the kernel on the hard disk which is not what I want because now I can't repartition it.
There is a message regarding some kind of failure on the ramdisk just prior to the system booting off the hard drive but there is not much time for me to write it down.

I just need a simple initrd.gz with networking enabled so I can perform some simple tasks with sfdisk and grub - nothing fancy.

Can you not just boot from USB and run the OS from there to re-configure the drive?

That was my first approach, but in the end product, the network connection is the only one available.

At first I didn't know what to google for, but then stumbled upon 'diskless ubuntu' - I believe that's what will do the trick.

Also, I now realize that the embedded subforum would have been a better place for this thread - can one of the admins move this topic over?