no physical memory for windows boot manager

[captain obious]

I'm getting an error when trying to boot to the local hard disk. The error is: "No physical memory is available at the location required for the Windows Boot Manager. The system can not continue.". This is on an HP bl460c G8 blade server with an Emulex NIC.

I am using the sanboot trick. If I simply exit, iPXE exits the PXE ROM, and then the machine gives the RSOD (red screen of death) with Illegal Opcode.

I am running BIOS version 9/8/13.

Bizarrely, the same machine can boot WinPE (using wimboot) - but not the local disk.

I have another blade server - a bl465 G0 with a Broadcom NIC that will boot just fine.

I've also got a VMware VM that will boot just fine.

I wonder if I am trying to do too deep of a chain?

I am using undionly.kkpxe with an embedded script:

Code:

#!ipxe
dhcp
chain http://awebsite/boot.php

which returns

Code:

#!ipxe
sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x80

Thoughts? Suggestions?

[robinsmidsrod]

I've heard of others that have had problems with HP Blade servers as well. You could see if it is possible to disable some of the embedded hardware to free up certain memory regions that might be in use by SCSI/SATA/SAS or other controllers. If there is a newer BIOS available you could try that as well. I seem to recall that one person had luck with a BIOS upgrade, but I might be wrong that it wasn't related to an HP blade, maybe it was an IBM. Please report back your findings.

[MultimediaMan]

(2014-01-30 23:11)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  I've heard of others that have had problems with HP Blade servers as well. You could see if it is possible to disable some of the embedded hardware to free up certain memory regions that might be in use by SCSI/SATA/SAS or other controllers. If there is a newer BIOS available you could try that as well. I seem to recall that one person had luck with a BIOS upgrade, but I might be wrong that it wasn't related to an HP blade, maybe it was an IBM. Please report back your findings.

I'll see if I can duplicate that issue... I have some BL460c Gen8s with VirtualConnect/ Emulex NICs.

[captain obious]

Thanks for the replies. I had been running an older BIOS, but had upgraded as part of testing with iPXE. One of the BIOS updates (Sept 2012) specifically addresses an issue booting PXELINUX. The upgrade made one of the red screens of death go away, but I still wasn't able to boot from the local disk.

I was finally able to resolve my issue. I had been using undionly.kkpxe and switching to undionly.kpxe solved my issue. This is in addition to the BIOS updates. I am now running I31 12/20/2013.

For others who are having issues PXE booting HP blade servers, I suggest the following:

1. UPGRADE THE BIOS! HP updates them often enough - its worth doing.
2. Try different iPXE images - .kpxe, .kkpxe, and .kkkpxe - different systems will react uniquely to each (some of my HP servers would boot fine off of kkpxe or kpxe - others only kpxe)
3. Try different boot methods - when I switched to kpxe, my G6 servers wouldn't boot using sanboot (but the G8s would). But switching back to exit worked fine, even on the G8 servers that wouldn't previously work with exit.
4. Don't be afraid to add lots of prompt to your script to help you debug and see where things go wrong.

I've been able to do some cool stuff so far with iPXE - its been worth the effort to figure it out.