iscsi map

[nguoicon]

Just migrated from gPXE to iPXE. Love the product, just have a few problems. I have access to a lot of Dell laptops. Trying to boot all these to the iscsi using iPXE. Problem: 20% of laptops does not recognize the iscsi drive when installing win7 from DVD. It looks normal through iPXE boots. BIOS map 0x80, keeping san connection, etc... when it comes to chose the drive to install OS drive does NOT show up. What could be the cause? BIOS or NIC not supported?

[mcb30]

(2011-04-08 18:26)nguoicon Wrote:  Just migrated from gPXE to iPXE. Love the product, just have a few problems. I have access to a lot of Dell laptops. Trying to boot all these to the iscsi using iPXE. Problem: 20% of laptops does not recognize the iscsi drive when installing win7 from DVD. It looks normal through iPXE boots. BIOS map 0x80, keeping san connection, etc... when it comes to chose the drive to install OS drive does NOT show up. What could be the cause? BIOS or NIC not supported?

Trying to install from DVD to iSCSI is known to be unreliable on several machines, due to quirks in different BIOSes. The most reliable solution is usually to try to boot the Windows installer itself over the network, rather than from the DVD. This avoids returning control to the BIOS after hooking the iSCSI drive, and so avoids most BIOS-specific problems in this area.

If you have a Windows Server OS available, you can set up Windows Deployment Services, which works well for this kind of setup. There's a walkthrough at http://ipxe.org/howto/wds_iscsi.

[nguoicon]

Thanks for the suggestion. Didn't have access to 2008 server with WDS, but as able to use your suggestion not to return control to bios. Was able to use chain command to boot to winpe "Chain tftp://server.com/path/boot.sdi". Will test out more units and update soon.

[nguoicon]

Got more units to work using chain winpe but not all. The rest get into winpe but the screen are blank out. Will try to get WDS.