[ipxe-devel] Win 2008r2 - sanboot image and install to iSCSI

[Andrew Bobulsky]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Marek Salwerowicz <marek_sal at wp.pl> wrote:
> W dniu 2012-08-01 21:00, Marek Salwerowicz pisze:
>
>>
>>
>> 1. sanhook --drive 0x80
>> iscsi:192.168.65.135::::iqn.2012-06.freenas.local:win2k8disk
>> 2. sanhook --drive 0x81 http://192.168.65.134/w2k8.iso
>> 3. chain tftp://192.168.65.134/Boot/pxeboot.0
>
> I forgot, of course with 'keep-san 1'
>
> --
> Marek
>
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Hello Marek,

Glad to see someone stumbled upon that technet forums post independently :)

I never did find a way to tell Setup to just "trust me, it's a
bootable disk you twerp."  I even went so far as manually building a
100MB System partition and creating a valid BCD, installed the NT6 MBR
and everything, even verified the disk COULD boot, but Windows Setup
just didn't care.  If you can find a way to manually (or scriptedly)
edit NT Objects, you could totally hack an ARC path into the device
object, but that's also closely related to saying "it's a computer,
anything is possible," so I don't know if I would go so far as to
recommend looking into it. ;)

On to your initiator issue:

>What's more, when trying to start the iSCSI service:
>
>X:\Windows\system32>net start msiscsi
>
>results in:
>The service name is invalid.
>
>Oliver, how to use the iSCSI service provided by default in WinPE4 ?

I never did figure out what particular brand of voodoo WinPE uses
during startup to shoehorn the iSCSI initiator into the environment
dynamically.  I've only used WinPE 3 for this, but the bottom line was
as follows:  If an iBFT exists during boot, the iSCSI initiator will
be in your WinPE and it'll be running.  If there is no iBFT, it won't
show up, nor will you be able to start it later.  This was with a
basic WinPE 3 that I built with CopyPE.cmd from the WAIK.  I rebuilt
it countless times too... it had a nasty habit of growing ever so
slightly every single time you re-packed the WIM file.  Really
annoying because I was going for speed in that scenario.  I can't
speak for WinPE 4, of course.

My... um... best suggestion would be to try the following:

If you're using the Undionly.kpxe or chainloaded ipxe.pxe builds,
since you're working in VMware, just "install" iPXE into your VM, and
save a template of that to make it easy for later.  I don't know WHY
it has seemed to change things on occasion for me, but anything more
"native" as far as the BIOS is concerned seems to behave better in my
completely anecdotal experience.  Not to mention it loads faster!  Doc
for it is here: http://ipxe.org/howto/vmware

Map your installation disk as drive 0x80, like so:

iPXE> sanhook --drive 0x80 iscsi:my.awesome.san::::my.awesome.target

And, instead of booting the full 2008 ISO, just boot a minimal PE, and
do it on a traditionally "optical" drive number:

iPXE> sanboot --drive 0xA0 --no-describe
http://my.web.server/images/WinPE_x64.iso

Then, when you get into WinPE, it'll give you a command line.  Map a
share on a server with the contents of the installation DVD:

net use z: \\fileserver\win2008cd mypa$$w0rd /user:mydomain\deploymentuser

Then load Setup from it:

z:\setup.exe /[it supports a TON of CLI switches, but you don't have
to use them]

You can script that into a file called StartNet.cmd that you'll find
in the WinPE's Windows or System32 folder... don't remember which off
the top of my head.

Not much more in the way of suggestions.  Keep us apprised of your
progress though, and I'll help out in any way I can!

Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsky