iPXE discussion forum

Hi there, I'm having great fun setting this up and have made a decent amount of progress already. I am, however now stuck and could do with a little help if possible! I'm specifically interested in booting ISO files.

I can get to the point where it loads up the menu found on this page. I can also edit the menu and add various items and get them to boot using memdisk. The problem, as I'm sure you know, is that some ISO's are larger than the amount of RAM available to the machine. For this reason and also to speed things up I have tried using sanboot. I am finding however that they start to load and then hang almost immediately afterwards.

Quote:For instance when I try to load the ERD Commander ISO (Windows 7 recovery disk) it fails with the error:

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:
1. Insert you Windows installation disc and restart your computer.
2. Choose your language settings, and then click "Next."
3. Click "Repair your computer."
If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000e
Info: An error occured while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

The entry within the menu.ipxe is:

Quote::erd
sanboot http://192.168.1.105:8085/ERD60_32_bit.iso

My gut feeling is that sanboot relies on iSCSI which I have yet to configure.

Any help at all would be great.

BB

Sanboot using HTTP and an ISO file works in the same way as memdisk, except the file is loaded in chunks into memory as needed. This requires your web server to support ranged requests. Apache does this in the default install on most distros. Sanboot itself doesn't require iSCSI, when used like this.

My guess is that the ERD tool is not loaded totally in memory, but tries to access the CD after it has booted. In that case, you need to figure out how to tell it to look for its information somewhere on the network, because the virtual CDROM is not available. If it is just a plain boot.wim file inside the ISO that is running a WinPE system then you should be able to boot it using wimboot, see http://ipxe.org/wimboot for details.