Can't netboot without root filesystem

[Tom Kirby]

I'm trying to net boot Clonezilla (Ubuntu version) with iPXE, following this guide. The kernel and initrd download fine and booting begins, but the kernel refuses to boot and I get dropped into an ash shell because I didn't specify a root= parameter. I did specify a fetch= parameter to retrieve a remote filesystem.squashfs, but I can't work out what the root= parameter should be as I'm not booting from a local filesystem. What am I doing wrong?

[Steven Shiau]

You did not share the PXE netboot config file on the server you have, so it's not easy for us to debug for you.
Here what we have and are sure it's working for us (assuming the kernel file is renamed as Clonezilla-live-vmlinuz, the the initrd file is renamed as Clonezilla-live-initrd.img. Both of them are from the dir "live" of clonezilla-live-20250303-oracular-amd64.zip):

menuentry "Clonezilla-live 20250303-oracular-amd64 (Ramdisk)" --id clonezilla-live-client {
  # This is Clonezilla live especially to be run for Clonezilla SE.
  # Do _NOT_ edit unless you know what you are doing!
  echo "Enter Clonezilla Live 20250303-oracular-amd64 (Ramdisk)..."
  echo 'Loading Clonezilla-live-vmlinuz...'
  linux Clonezilla-live-vmlinuz initrd=Clonezilla-live-initrd.img boot=live union=overlay username=user hostname=oracular config quiet loglevel=0 noswap edd=on nomodeset enforcing=0 noeject locales= keyboard-layouts= ocs_live_run=ocs-live-general ocs_live_extra_param= ocs_live_batch=no net.ifnames=0 splash noeject fetch=tftp://172.18.0.1/Clonezilla-live-filesystem.squashfs 
  echo 'Loading initial ramdisk Clonezilla-live-initrd.img...'
  initrd Clonezilla-live-initrd.img
}   

Steven

[Tom Kirby]

Thanks Steven - very useful to have a copy of your PXE config file.

Same solution as my other post - it turns out the source of the trouble was passing an ip=dhcp parameter to the kernel. I think I must have got it from some online guide or other, but when I removed it everything worked fine.