[ipxe-devel] WinPE 3.0, boot with iSCSI target

[Andrew Bobulsky]

Hello Marek,

I find myself unable to load the gregorystrike.com domain you
reference in your email, so I'll try my best here at a solution for
you:

Double check the contents of your ISO file.  If you're attempting to
boot a flat WinPE ISO, where you see a \Windows and \Program Files
directory, while you *shouldn't* be experiencing an error reading the
BCD, it will fail at a later point in time.  Generally, you'll only be
able to SAN-Boot a WinPE ISO that extracts the PE from a .wim file,
usually located in \Sources\boot.wim.

Second, I'm guessing that you're attempting to install directly to an
iSCSI target.  You'll want to change your 'sanhook' directive to omit
the '--no-describe' option.  That option prevents the SAN disk from
being written into the iBFT, and as such it will not get passed to
your WinPE when it boots.  Also, you *may* have more success if you
mount the ISO as a drive letter more formally seen as an optical disk,
such as 0xE0.  As such, your new boot commands would look like:

dhcp
set keep-san 1
sanhook --drive 0x80 iscsi:192.168.146.132::::iqn.2012-01.local:win7disk
sanboot --drive 0xE0 --no-describe http://10.0.0.1/path.to.WinPE.iso

It's entirely possible that this might not work at all, or leave you
in the exact same situation.  But, I've had a few minor tweaks like
those resolve some issues with more stubborn machine BIOSes in the
past, and hope that it might work for you ;)

Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsky

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 7:14 AM, Marek Salwerowicz <marek_sal at wp.pl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> W dniu 2012-03-14 01:09, Slawomir Latkowski pisze:
>
>> Hi Marek,
>>
>> I don't think it will boot from iSCSI target.
>> The tutorial you were following says about (...I have dedicated my
>> time to figuring out a way to mount iSCSI targets under our custom
>> WinPE v3.0 (Windows 7 Based) environment...) but not to boot from
>> iSCSI target.
>
> As far as I know, sanboot allows to boot the Live-CD image (like my WinPE
> ISO).
> What's more, when I do not set iSCSI Target ( sanhook....) and ONLY boot
> Live-CD, everything works.
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Marek Salwerowicz
>
>
>>
>> Maybe I miss a point...
>>
>> Regards,
>> Slawek
>>
>> W dniu 13 marca 2012 23:51 użytkownik Marek Salwerowicz
>> <marek_sal at wp.pl>  napisał:
>>>
>>> Hi list,
>>>
>>> I have a problem with trying to boot WinPE 3.0 (prepared according to:
>>>
>>> http://www.gregorystrike.com/2010/01/08/winpe-v3-0-and-microsoft-iscsi-initiator/).
>>> I've prepared it under Win7 Pro.
>>>
>>> I have downladed from git repository current tree, prepared the ISO image
>>> of
>>> iPXE (under Debian Squeeze)
>>>
>>> I have set up the iSCSI target under FreeNAS
>>>
>>> After booting my machine from iPXE ISO image i type following commands:
>>>
>>> dhcp
>>> set keep-san 1
>>> sanhook --drive 0x80 --no-describe
>>> iscsi:192.168.146.132::::iqn.2012-01.local:win7disk
>>> sanboot --drive 0x81 --no-describe http://10.0.0.1/path.to.WinPE.iso
>>>
>>> WinPE stops during boot and displays following message:
>>>
>>> File: \Boot\BCD
>>> Status: 0xc000000e
>>> Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration
>>> data.
>>>
>>> When I do not attach iSCSI target and only boot the WinPE iso file,
>>> everything is OK, but (of course) I can't install Windows under my iSCSI
>>> target.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have an idea what I am doing wrong?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Regards,
>>> Marek Salwerowicz
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ipxe-devel mailing list
>>> ipxe-devel at lists.ipxe.org
>>> https://lists.ipxe.org/mailman/listinfo/ipxe-devel
>
>
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