[ipxe-devel] VMWare E1000 (8086:100f) iBFT?

[Robin Smidsrød]

On 08.04.2012 20:19, Marek Salwerowicz wrote:
> I am wondering if driver for regular VMWare (workstation 8) NIC (as far
> as I know it is Intel E1000) has support for registering the iSCSI
> target (connected via that NIC) in iBFT?
> I am still working on enabling Windows 7 (x86) installation on iSCSI
> target.
> 
> I am able to 'sanhook' my iSCSI target and 'sanboot' the ISO file with
> WinPE 3.0
> 
> DISKPART tool in WinPE also recognizes the target as drive, I can format
> it etc.
> 
> Windows 7 installer also recognizes the drive, but does not allow me to
> install on it  (it's not stored in BIOS etc...)
> After browsing thread at reboot.pro :
> 
> http://reboot.pro/15965/
> 
> I think that the problem is because the NIC driver in iPXE doesn't have
> support for iSCSI Boot Firmware Table (iBFT), so the iSCSI target is not
> registered in iBFT, so that can't be used as destination for installing
> Windows 7

iPXE does support setting the iBFT, and it does so by default (see the
--no-describe option of sanboot/sanhook). Usually the install drive must
be set as --drive 0x80, and you need to start with a completely
unpartitioned volume for the installer to accept it. You might also have
problems if your computer already has another physical HDD installed.
You might have success booting WinPE via sanboot hooked to 0x81 (with
--no-describe), and some users have also had success using memdisk
instead of sanboot, as they use slightly different emulation methods
(apparently).

The safer way is usually to use a Windows WDS server, as described in
the howto on the ipxe.org website, http://ipxe.org/howto/wds_iscsi.

Hope this helps,

-- Robin