[ipxe-devel] New Command Idea

[Michael Brown]

On 05/07/16 22:09, Sascha Böhme wrote:
> we successfully tested and DID bare metal recovery by
>
> ·sanhook the iSCSI target we backup the wbadmin image to
>
> ·boot wim and choose install
> -> Windows installer inspects iBFT and mounts LUN/volumes J
>
> ·cancel install / go back and choose repair option / System Image Recovery
>
> Volume still mounted, repair tool finds backups and you can recover
> from. No-one seems to know that…

Nice trick.  :)

> Problem: GPT formatted disk will obviously not work for sanboot/sanhook
> and hence there is nothing in the iBFT.
>
> Idea: New command: *sandesc*iscsi:1.2.3.4::::iqn… that just fills the
> iBFT with the target for Windows installer without hooking into int 13h.
>
> Question: Is there any chance this idea could work?

It's very unlikely.  Windows will use INT 13 to retrieve the MBR disk 
signature, and uses this to correlate the bootable (i.e. INT 13) disks 
with the iSCSI disks.  If there is no INT 13 disk available, then it 
won't be able to make this correlation.

(It's also very possible that the INT 13 code in Windows wouldn't be 
able to retrieve a GUID signature from a GPT disk anyway, even if INT 13 
were hooked.)

Michael