[ipxe-devel] Booting from local disk on HP ProLiant machines

[Matthew Helton]

If you simply exit out of the script instead of trying a local sanboot,
does it work? What model HP ProLiant?



On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 4:22 AM, Christoph Schug
<chris+ipxe-devel at schug.net>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am currently trying to use iPXE for some staged booting environment
> where the boot process of each server can be controlled centrally on the
> boot server by supplying individual iPXE bootstrap configurations (e.g.,
> install operating system, wipe disks,
> boot from local disk) without having to alter/reload DHCP configuration at
> all.
>
> I have some difficulties to get that working with some older HP ProLiant
> machines I have available in my lab. Basically everything works except
> booting from local disk. It doesn't matter if I drive this by an iPXE
> script or enter the sanboot command on the iPXE
> shell manually.
>
> | iPXE> sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x80
> | Booting from SAN device 0x80
>
> At this point nothing obvious happens and it takes pretty much exactly 300
> seconds for the command to return with
>
> | GRUB Read Error
> | Booting from SAN device 0x80 failed: Operation canceled (
> http://ipxe.org/0b8080a0)
> | iPXE>
>
> BTW, on consecutive retries of the same command it returns instantly (no 5
> minutes delay) with the same error. If I skip PXE booting entirely in the
> BIOS the machine boots just fine from local disk, so I am tempted to
> exclude a flawed installation of GRUB or the operating system. I rather
> assume that there is some memory corruption problem which causes that
> behavior as similar problems with older HP ProLiants were also reported on
> similar projects, e.g. http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/**index.php/Hardware_*
> *Compatibility#LOCALBOOT_on_HP_**ProLiant_servers<http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility#LOCALBOOT_on_HP_ProLiant_servers>
>
> Unfortunately I don't have any different hardware at hand to verify that I
> am not running in some generic problem unrelated to the type of hardware.
> The specs of a machine in question where things break is a HP DL365 G5
> (ProLiant System BIOS A10 as of 05/02/2011).
>
> Again, it is just booting from local disk that is broken, triggering a PXE
> install of Debian Linux for example works superb. I also tried to
> workaround by chaining chain.c32 for example but no luck as well.
>
> | #!ipxe
> |
> | chain http://boot.example.com/chain.**c32<http://boot.example.com/chain.c32>hd0
>
> In this case there is also this some minute delay and the machine dies
> horrible with "Illegal OpCode" and some garbaged (which even more suggests
> memory corruption) register dump (white font on red background, I rather
> assume this error does not originate from iPXE code).
>
> Has anyone experience with similar hardware and is aware of a feasible
> workaround? Or any other hints how to debug this issue?
>
> Thanks in advance
> Christoph
>
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-- 
There is never time enough to do it right, but there always seems to be
enough time to do it again.
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