iPXE does not exit properly and unable to boot locally

[kpdhanraj]

Hi,

Myself Dhanraj, and am trying to incorporate Razor env in to our network.
Am very new to this iPXE, Razor stuffs.

Coming to my problem, I am trying to bring up a bare metal server (Cisco UCS c200 M2) to load ESX5.1 with the help of Razor. I could see, my server powers up, then go for network boot (my 1st boot option is NW boot and second boot option is local HDD), iPXE boot is successful, Razor installation of ESX 5.1 is also successful.

After the above step, we expect the system to boot using the second boot option (HDD in my case) and complete the ESX5.1 installation steps without any user intervention. But here, the console hangs with the following o/p,

PXE-E61 - Media test Failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.

To debug this, we logged in to iPXE console using 'control+B' and gace 'exit'. The result is same as above, it hangs with the following message.

PXE-E61 - Media test Failure, check cable
PXE-MOF: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.

We wanted to know why the exit from ipxe results in this state. Instead, when we do a sanboot from he console 'sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x80` it went through properly. Why the box is not booting locally at the end of this installation. I have attached the snapshot of the error message. Please have a look.

Can someone please help us to know the solution for this. Appreciate your inputs.

Regards,
Dhanarajan.P

[robinsmidsrod]

This is a problem with the existing PXE ROM on the machine. It (Intel Boot Agent) doesn't seem to exit properly when iPXE exits back to it. The reason sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x80 works is because it forcibly just skips that part of the Intel Boot Agent code and goes straight to the MBR of the first drive. You might want to find out if there is a firmware update for either the Intel Boot Agent or your BIOS (which probably includes it).

Using sanboot instead of exit is a kludge and should generally be avoided. Ask your server provider for an updated BIOS.

I do know that someone in the razor community tried to create a list of machines that need this workaround. You should ask around.