Acronis True Image Workstation Network Boot

Acronis True Image Workstation is a powerfull backup program for your workstaion. You can create a CD which you can use to backup all your partitions to network or attachted storage. Later on you can do a bare metal restore from your backups.
However if you want to backup your computers regularily dealing with the CD is boring and beeing able to use the Acronis software via a network (PXE) boot is really convenient. The following steps show you how to setup a network booted Acronis True Image with the pxelinux network boot environment.

1. Create the CD image from the installed Acronis Windows Software. Then either burn the image or transfer the image file to a linux computer.
2. Mount the Acronis CD: mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt or if you have an iso image file: mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/iso /mnt.
3. Copy the relevant files: cp /mnt/Recovery\ Manager/kernel.dat /tftpboot/acronis-9.1 and cp /mnt/Recovery\ Manager/ramdisk.dat /tftpboot/acronis-9.1.img
4. Add the following to your pxelinux configuration (/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default):

   label acronis
     KERNEL acronis-9.1
     APPEND initrd=acronis-9.1.img ramdisk_size=30000 vga=0x315
   

5. Now you can boot into your Acronis Linux. The program is not started automatically with this method, you have to start it at the boot prompt with product. If someone knows any arguments for the linux kernel so it starts the product binary automatically, please let me know.
6. If you get a kernel panic when booting you can increase the ramdisk_size parameter. To use a 64MiB ramdisk use ramdisk_size=64000. You can also choose a higher display resolution, for example to choose 1024x768: vga=0x318 or 1280x1024: vga=0x31B.

I don't show how to setup your DHCP and tftp servers. Look with your favourite search engine how to do this with Unix or Windows.