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

[Marek Salwerowicz]

W dniu 2012-04-09 13:05, Robin Smidsrød pisze:
> 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).
For me sanhooking the iSCSI target to 0x80 doesn't allow WinPE to boot 
(there is an 0xc000000e error I mentioned some time ago).
VM doesn't have any hard drive controller connected.
I am still wondering if I have the WinPE image correctly prepared (it's 
standard WinPE x86 with iSCSI drivers/utilities) - maybe I need sth more 
to modify in it..

iSCSI target is sanhooked to 0x81, and WinPE ISO is sanbooting (with 
--no-describe) from 0xE0.

>
> 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.
Probably I will have a deeper look into it, but my experiment idea was 
to allow "end-users" install Windows on their own.


Regards,
-- 
Marek