[ipxe-devel] HTTP SAN / ISO booting

[James A. Peltier]

----- Original Message -----
| Most likely you're running into what is essentially a "Missing boot
| device driver." Commonly a "7B" blue screen on Windows.
| 
| While iPXE can speak HTTP just fine and translate an ISO file as a
| physical disk to BIOS, because HTTP-sourced SAN devices don't have a
| BFT mechanism like iSCSI does (the iBFT), iPXE can't pass information
| about what the "boot" device is or how to access it to the operating
| system once it's online. Presumably, after the CentOS live CD you're
| using loads the kernel and its drivers, it still needs to source more
| files from that CD to finish the boot process. iPXE is non-functional
| at that point, and since the OS can't find the disk, it crashes.
| 
| Any Live CD that boots *completely* into a RAM disk will work very,
| very well with this boot method though. I use it to boot Windows PE
| 3, and on a moderately fast computer, it's online in 10 seconds or so.
| 
| Perhaps someone else on the list could suggest a Live CD for CentOS
| that boots from a RAM disk device?
| 
| Best Regards,
| Andrew Bobulsky

But, the raw ISO image does boot on a system with no hard disk indicating that it is booting into a full RAM disk.  The only difference is that it's a CD drive attached to my KVM host.  This would then seem to indicate that the sanboot of the ISO image is not presenting as a physical disk of any sort to the underlying operating system and thereby dying.  Would this be correct?

-- 
James A. Peltier
IT Services - Research Computing Group
Simon Fraser University - Burnaby Campus
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E-Mail  : jpeltier at sfu.ca
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