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+--- Thread: Can a Windows 2016 server provide two PXE boot sources? (/showthread.php?tid=11073)
Can a Windows 2016 server provide two PXE boot sources? - InteXX - 2018-03-19 08:12
I'm here because I have very little experience with the concept of PXE boot. In fact I've only used it once or twice to restore workstation images from Server Essentials backups (re: https://windowsserveressentials.com/2014/01/30/essentials-2012-r2-client-restore/).
But I've now run into a pretty serious problem that's preventing me from running a clean Windows Enterprise install on a workstation. You can read about the whole saga here:
https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/issues/1097
In a nutshell, the ISO contains files that are too big for FAT32, and apparently the UEFI on this system doesn't properly support booting to NTFS.
It's starting to look like my only option here is a network boot (at least if I want to use UEFI, that is—which I do). But I'm already running a PXE server with 2016 Essentials Server. I need to retain the current functionality; I can't get rid of it.
Is it possible to have two different PXE sources running on the same Hyper-V Gen2 VM? The first would be the native functionality built-in to Essentials, and the second would be iPXE serving up a +4GB ISO (over a gigabit Ethernet LAN). And if so, how/where would I even begin setting this up?
I'm afraid I get absolutely lost when I start to read about all of this.
RE: Can a Windows 2016 server provide two PXE boot sources? - NiKiZe - 2018-03-19 17:32
First of, no EFI implementation should support booting from NTFS it is FAT32 only.
The solution here is to have a 512MB-1GB FAT32 partition on usb device that contains all the boot files, and then have another partition that is NTFS that contains the full sources directory.
It seems you got this working in the rufus issue, but be sure it is actually using EFI, and has not fallbacked to pcbios mode (which is the only way that it should be able to boot from a NTFS filesystem)
If you want to have boot windows PXE services and iPXE for efi then no, you will have to choose one or the other.
With iPXE you can always chain into the other, but not really trivial.
But before that, build the ipxe.efi, or snp.efi which you can copy to a USB drive as bootx64.efi and then use that to test things out before modifying the dhcp server to send these out. (see http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets for how this is done, and there is also some prebuilt ones at boot.ipxe.org)
RE: Can a Windows 2016 server provide two PXE boot sources? - InteXX - 2018-03-21 00:54
(2018-03-19 17:32)NiKiZe Wrote: First of, no EFI implementation should support booting from NTFS it is FAT32 only.Hm, it seems you're at odds with Mr. Batard:
https://github.com/pbatard/uefi-ntfs
But like I said, I'm new to this. I'll prefer to sit back and watch you two duke it out; all I ask is that you let me know where I can find a front seat to the contest ;-)
(2018-03-19 17:32)NiKiZe Wrote: But before that, build the ipxe.efi, or snp.efi which you can copy to a USB drive as bootx64.efi and then use that to test things out before modifying the dhcp server to send these out. (see http://ipxe.org/appnote/buildtargets for how this is done, and there is also some prebuilt ones at boot.ipxe.org)I'm not sure I'm following along on how to create this iPXE/UEFI/ISO.
You mention creating and using a file [bootx64.efi], but that carries a different extension than *.ISO. I'm going to want to end up with an *.ISO file for building the stick. Does this new [bootx64.efi] replace the one that's currently in \boot\efi?
Could you go into a little more detail? Slowly, please :-)