[ipxe-devel] SAN iso boot to install Win8 to SAN question..

[Andrew Bobulsky]

Hello Jarrod,

While I can't speak to your iPXE question, I'd suggest you try hooking
the HDD LUN as 0x80, and the ODD LUN as a traditional ODD bios drive
number (0xE0 I think?  Not sure off the top of my head :P), and try
booting that.

You might also have some luck by doing a SAN attach of the HDD and
then booting the ISO as an initrd to MEMDISK. A plain old WinPE iso
that is, then grab your windows install files via SMB or something
similar.

Windows installer really, really hates when ARC paths are screwed with
via INT13 hooks, and often only the first device hooked in that
fashion, or your ISO in the "successful" boot scenario you've had,
will have a fully resolved path.

If only Windows had a "trust me a swear this thing will boot" setting ;)

Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsky

On Jan 5, 2012, at 9:30 PM, Jarrod Johnson <jarrod.b.johnson at gmail.com> wrote:

> So normally I'd do a typical PXE boot of WinPE to install to a new san, but in this case I have a little complexity that prevents that at the moment.
>
> So I used tgtd to give me two luns, a blank drive as lun 1 and a windows install ISO as lun 2.
>
> I tried hooking it as 0x80 for the hard drive and 0x81 for the optical drive.  sanboot --drive 0x81 goes blank and reboots shortly.
>
> Then I swapped and hooked 0x80 as the optical and 0x81 as the hard drive.  Installer started, Windows presented the blank disk I had provided, but Windows then refuses to install to the disk saying 'ensure that the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's BIOS menu'.  I assume it's somehow unhappy with the state of what it determined through EDD, but Windows is fairly unhelpful in this regard.
>
> So two questions, has anyone tried windows install to 0x81 iscsi drive by ipxe?  Alternatively, why wasn't I able to boot the iso if I hooked it to 0x81 instead of 0x80?
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